These are podcasts’ most enthralling and entrancing stories that would make for highly-anticipated films or television projects.
Podcasts have quickly become one of the most useful, interesting, and yet unconventional ways of distributing a story to fellow listeners. Painting a picture of each scene through the utilization of words and sounds alone to further immerse viewers into the content, the structure of a podcast is meant to share relevant knowledge or stories with audiences. Listening to a podcast can transform many situations into pleasant ones, be it facing a morning commute, intense workout, a home cleaning session, or as a nighttime activity, either after dinner or before bed.
Instead of watching yet another screen in this modern world, in which our social, professional, personal, and cultural life is mediated through a glowing screen (or having to spend a ton of money on blue light glasses to mitigate the damage from screens having become a way of life), listeners can safely consume their favorite shows simply through audio. It's genuinely ironic that the technology of the entertainment industry largely began with radio, and has now come full circle to audio-only stories again with podcasts.
The term 'podcasting' was first created by journalist Ben Hammersly in a 2004 newspaper article for The Guardian. Writing about an audible revolution, Hammersly set an argument that the necessities for the potential boom in amateur radio consisted of blogging, production software, and the use of MP3 players to distribute said content for the masses, i.e. podcasts. Throughout the past two decades, it has become a proven fact that podcasts have aided in raising awareness to real and important issues, bringing about social change on a worldwide scale. Google Podcasts has brought audio stories from around the world to hundreds of millions of listeners.
The same stories in podcasts have been famously turned into scripts intended to unfold on the big screen, such as Homecoming and Lore, yet there is a vast amount of untapped cinematic potential in these podcasts. It's a risk, because creating visual media for an already much-loved podcast can either bring forth closure and gratification from listeners, or can greatly disappoint them. There are some gems in the best podcasts, though, that have such great plot-lines, characters, and excessive twists and turns, that they're just utterly conducive for adaptation and expansion into the cinematic medium. These are the best podcasts to turn into movies or TV shows.
The weekly true-crime podcast Crime Junkie is dedicated to telling the stories of both missing and deceased individuals in order to spread the word and ultimately solve those cases (with sometimes go pending for years or even decades). Each week, two friends from South Bend Indiana (Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat) gather an extensive amount of research materials and narrate a series of stories that are new every week, revolving around the true crime spectrum. During the Operation Fire Ball episode, the story describes an experience from a young woman's point of view after a failed attempt to meet a guy through an online dating app. It exposes the dangers related to human trafficking, and in part two focuses on the numerous emails Ashley and Brit received from an influx of listeners describing the same scenarios that happened to them as in the first episode. It's a profoundly engrossing and sometimes relatable show, available on Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Nice White Parents describes the occurrence that took place in 2015, when a group of wealthy white families began to integrate their children into a local school in Brooklyn, New York, called The School for International Studies (SIS). Previously a school highly populated by predominantly Black, Latino, and Middle Eastern children deriving from working class and poor families, the series centers around an international French program one of the white families created, prompting a divide between the bubble they created between them and the other parents of the school. Once a large amount of money is raised in order to support the program, tensions start to mount due to the other parents and their children feeling excluded. It's a gripping, real story that's perfect for our times.
After a strange letter suddenly appears on the city councilor's desk in Birmingham, England, detailing an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city's school district; the series tells the story behind the supposedly fake document. Though the letter is believed to be fake, the content that The Trojan Horse Affair artfully delves into does have a way of tying Islamophobia into the 2014 Birmingham schools controversy, both one-sided at times while risking the reopening of old wounds. Stirring up feelings of outrage and anger from those who have been knotted into the war on terror label without merit, the majority of Muslims in Britain have had trouble trying to distance themselves from this narrative illustrated by media outlets and government officials who have been perpetuating these stereotypes of extremism and radicalization. The show is a divisive, cultural lightning rod; take a look at it on Google Podcasts or Spotify, and see for yourself.
This American Life is a weekly podcast and public television radio program from Chicago, which has been telling the real-life stories of everyday compelling people and their unique circumstances long before podcasting, since 1995. The show remains brilliant, but has found renewed success on Google Podcasts after one of its producers and presenters went on to ignite a natio-wide passion for true crime with her podcast, Serial. Deriving from a multitude of themes, and ranging from humor to sometimes more serious subject matters, the individual short stories raise universal issues that many listeners may have either experienced or know someone who has. It brings forth a bigger, more centralized question from personal experiences, and, like its title implies, has become an important part of American life over the past two decades. DreamWorks bought the rights to their stories, so various feature films may be produced from this excellent radio show.
