Podcast Scouts Are On The Hunt For TV Content. Here’s What They’re Looking For.

It’s the first day of MIPCOM, the annual television and film conference, which brings distributors and buyers together in Cannes from around the globe. But this year, there won’t be any strolls along the Mediterranean city’s promenade, just digital dealmaking.

MIPCOM today won’t be like last year’s. But little in television is. While many shows are in production, sets look and feel different, and there are extra costs and risks associated with bringing dozens of people into close proximity. Given these Covid burdens, many studios have prioritized filling their pipelines with great content for the post-Covid world.

This increased demand for stocked slates for future projects has kept literary scouts busy trying to fill the supply side. But these days they’re not just looking for books. Podcasts are a new source to mine for media gold.

Over the past few years there have been several popular TV shows that started off as audio programs. Gimlet Media’s Homecoming made the move from audio-only to TV with Amazon Prime and starring Julia Roberts. The Dirty John podcast, which was itself adapted from an L.A. Times article series, became a Bravo show with Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Wondery, who produced Dirty John, also has Dr. Death set to launch as a TV show with Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater. It’s no wonder that studios are eyeing iTunes charts hoping to find an extraordinary story whose audience appeal has already been tested.

All great podcasts, however, won’t make good television. So what does?

Here’s what scouts are considering in their searches. 

A podcast’s production company matters. When the company has a history of hits, buyers feel more confidently securing a show early, before it has proven its own ability to engage listeners and future viewers. 

The podcast network is another consideration. A big one can give a new show a wider following and help it to rise to the top of the charts. Networks can do this by pushing their new releases to the audiences of their existing hits. This level of marketing attracts buyers.

But even when a show is destined for podcasting greatness—or has already achieved it—it’s not necessarily going to work out as a television adaptation. Chart-topper This American Life, one of the first contemporary audio shows to make the jump from radio to TV, is open about the challenges that they faced in the transition.

Some elements of the radio show transferred easily. Their website explains, “each week there are a bunch of stories organized around a theme. The stories are the same sorts we do on the radio, true stories about real people.” But the shift to TV still wasn’t easy. “The hard part was everything else.”

This American Life’s television show was on Showtime for two seasons.

So what separates the winners from the losers? What type of podcast can succeed in the move to the small screen? “As with any other piece of material, it’s thinking about whether the central question posed by the podcast has legs for adaptation into a series or a film franchise,” says Claire Lundberg, owner and CEO of CTL Scouting, an international literary scouting firm. When it comes to podcasts, her clients are seeking IP to turn into scripted TV and film. With that parameter, she questions, “is [the podcast] asking something in a new way, and does it have possibilities for casting that might make it live on screen?”

The creative potential alone isn’t enough, though. Rights are another issue. “True crime still makes up a huge amount of the most popular podcasts,” Lundberg says. “These require a grant of rights from the subjects (‘life rights’) for adaptation that aren’t always possible to get.”

Given this and other common impediments to podcast adaptation to TV, Lundberg doesn’t see audio source material overtaking books anytime soon. “While [podcasts] are a larger part of what I”m scouting, the rights are not as clean as with books, so books are still my core business,” she says.

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