The Half-Truth: What Fictional TV Series Don't Tell You About Making a Podcast
Grab your phone, open a recording app, talk for twenty minutes about an unsolved crime and… that’s it, you’re the next true-crime sensation. At least, that’s what shows like Only Murders in the Building, Truth Be Told, Bodkin and Nobody Wants This have been selling us for years. The problem is that this televised fantasy bears about as much resemblance to reality as a wardrobe does to a professional recording studio. And yes, there is literally a show out there in which the leads record inside a closet because it “sounds better” — even though anyone who works in audio knows that’s simply a decent fix for when the acoustics aren’t on your side.
A recent academic study conducted by Spanish researchers at Universidad Abat Oliba CEU (CEU Universities) — myself included — has just put in black and white what many professionals in the industry have been quietly grumbling about for a while. After dissecting 85 episodes across four series centred on true-crime podcasters, the study confirms that fiction is building an image of podcasting that is, at best, a crude simplification, and at worst, a fantasy flatly incompatible with the physics of sound.
The “anyone can do it” myth
Podcasting was sold from the outset as the democratisation of the microphone: no licences, no radio studios, no bosses. Anyone with a computer and enough motivation could launch a show. So far, so true. But there’s a chasm between that and what appears on screen. Professional podcasters themselves have been repeating this for years, with more than a little exasperation: a lot of people think making a podcast just means sitting in front of a microphone and talking, and that assuming so is almost disrespectful to those who take the craft seriously.
As it turns out, half of the podcasters portrayed in these series are exactly that: amateurs with no training, no experience and no technical know-how whatsoever who, within a couple of scenes, are already publishing polished episodes with thousands of listeners. Think of the nosy neighbours in Only Murders in the Building — a semi-retired actor, a retired theatre director and a twenty-something with more attitude than experience — or the sisters in Nobody Wants This. Whether by accident or by design (it does make for compelling storytelling), fiction is handing audiences the idea that producing a podcast is a matter of lucky amateurs, undercutting the value of the craft.
Microphones a metre away, unsoundproofed living rooms and headphones as props
Here comes the juiciest part — the one that should make any sound engineer wince: the gear and spaces used by these fictional characters, once examined closely, wouldn’t come anywhere near producing a genuinely good-quality podcast.
In Truth Be Told, the journalist protagonist records in her own dining room, with the microphones positioned too far from her mouth — outside the range that actually captures voice properly — and with zero acoustic treatment. Bodkin fares worst of all technically: the American reporter wanders around Ireland with a simple handheld recorder and an external microphone, never once wearing headphones during the shoot — something unthinkable in real production, since without monitoring the recording live, it’s impossible to catch noise, clipping or errors until it’s too late. And in Nobody Wants This, the leads hold the microphone in their hands while sitting on the sofa, generating exactly the kind of handling noise that every Sound Communication lecturer teaches students to avoid from day one.
The exception, curiously, is the most farcical comedy of the four: Only Murders in the Building is, paradoxically, the one that most accurately depicts real technical gear — directional mics, lavalier mics, boom poles — even though its characters have no idea how to use any of it. Fiction’s little irony: the clumsiest characters are the ones carrying the most professional kit.
And then there’s the detail likely to draw a laugh from any sound engineer: in three of the four series, the recording spaces are spacious living rooms, with no walls to block sound, open to adjoining rooms and with no acoustic isolation whatsoever. Beautiful spaces for the camera, certainly. Utterly useless for capturing clean audio. The echo, resonance and interference that would creep into those recordings in real life would turn any episode into a sonic mess.
What the series leave out (and it’s a lot)
Beyond the badly placed microphone, the study points to something even more revealing: the stages of the work that fiction chooses not to show. While pre-production and, above all, recording hog nearly all the screen time, entire processes simply vanish from the story. Podcast promotion — that invisible work of social media, community-building and outreach without which, as professionals themselves acknowledge, no project lacking a big name behind it gets anywhere — is never portrayed in any of the four series. Nor is technical editing: those hours spent in front of audio-editing software, cutting, mixing and cleaning up sound, which on screen gets resolved, at best, with a fade to black.
It’s the same narrative trick that film and television have applied to radio, the sound medium par excellence, for decades: show the extraordinary, hide the tedious. We all remember films like Radio Days (Woody Allen, 1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1987) and Talk Radio (Oliver Stone, 1988), or series like WKRP in Cincinnati (Hugh Wilson, 1978–1982) and Midnight Caller (Richard DiLello, 1988–1991). The result is a craft that, on screen, looks like pure passion and adrenaline, while in real life it’s made up, above all, of hours of silent work and hardship that nobody ever films.
Why should you care?
As with any craft depicted on screen, the way podcasting is represented isn’t neutral. It shapes expectations. If millions of viewers internalise the idea that making a successful podcast is just a matter of a phone, a closet and one inspired weekend, the gap between that fantasy and reality — scripts, editing, soundproofing, distribution strategy, months of invisible work — can end up leaving newcomers frustrated when they discover the path isn’t as simple as they thought.
For those who make a living from this, none of it comes as a surprise: every time someone says, “Oh, you have a podcast? That’s so cool, I should start one myself someday,” they’re probably picturing a scene from one of these series. And that’s precisely where the real value of this kind of academic research lies: it’s not about asking fiction to turn into a sound-production tutorial, but about understanding that the gap between what’s shown on screen and what actually happens behind the microphone is exactly the argument the industry needs to keep making, loudly and repeatedly. As long as fiction keeps selling the myth of the podcast improvised in an unsoundproofed living room, it will remain the job of those who know the craft to explain, again and again, why what they do is so much more than sitting in front of a microphone and talking.
