For real though—it’s something I make sure to give a spread of when I’m trying to recommend audio dramas.
Do you want something that feels like an audiobook, with a single narrator narrating every action and thought, with maybe a few interjections of voice acting treated more like part of the soundscape? That’s what Old Gods of Appalachia is like, and uses it to great effect—the feeling of immersive campfire storytelling. Janus Descending is another one I recommend for people who want something more on the audiobook side—it has two alternating voices, with long lyrical descriptive and introspective passages.
Wolf 359, meanwhile, is produced like a stage play, its staging and delivery extremely theatrical. I would love to see more audio dramas taking production cues from theater, because the skills and logics transfer really well. The other Long Story Short/Kinda Evil Genius productions, Zero Hours and Unseen, take other modes of very stage-like production (Zero Hours is a series of self-contained dialogues between two people in one location; Unseen is an anthology of soliloquies.) They feel like they’re being written and produced and directed the way a stage show might.
(Speaking of soliloquies, Seren operates mostly in soliloquy mode as well.)
Then you have ones that are styled more like traditional radio plays, with a scene-setting narrator interspersed with scenes of acting and action. Victoriocity is working in this space, and doing it charmingly and well. This is imo kind of surprisingly uncommon in modern audio drama; it feels like it calls attention to itself in ways other production modes don’t, but it also allows for a flexibility of scene-setting that other podcasts sometimes struggle with.
Then, of course, there are fiction podcasts that style themselves like nonfiction podcasts. Arden with its fictional true crime murder mystery, Murray Mysteries with its slice of life talk podcast that accidentally becomes a record of hunting Dracula, woe.begone with its frame of Mike Walters narrating his experience with this ARG. Arden and woe.begone both slowly lose that framing as the shows go on, becoming more diegetic action—though woe.begone never loses the narration part, and at that point it feels like, that’s just how this podcast is, it doesn’t need a diegetic explanation.
Fictional radio broadcasts like The Last Show and of course Welcome to Night Vale are also part of this production style logic.
And then of course there’s the fully diegetic, fully action, major-motion-picture-without-the-picture—The Strange Case of Starship Iris, Roguemaker, The Pasithea Powder, InCo… it’s a story told through dialogue and soundscaping, and everything you hear is literally happening.
And there are shows that slide from one format to another (many shows with explicit framing devices slide more towards the Major Motion Picture mode the longer they go, including Wolf 359 and Ars Paradoxica), and ones that deliberately set out to play with those format, like Greater Boston, which I often describe as a “mosaic” because different episodes or scenes use modes of soliloquy, narration, action, diegetic broadcasts, switching between them to create a unique effect.
And then there’s whatever the hell What’s The Frequency is doing (affectionate) (but also genuinely confused).
And that’s still a different axis from literal audio production mechanics, such as how many voice actors there are (one, four, a hundred…), whether there’s music (Wolf 359 and woe.begone have amazing music), whether the creators have a fancy sound studio and high-end professional editing or are recording in their closet…
I know I feel like I need to consider all of these when I’m trying to find audio drama recs that work for people!
