Almost a century removed, it’s wild that the shadow of Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds radio play continues to linger. You might be familiar with the legend: The play’s fictional depiction of a radio broadcast delivering live news reports of Martians invading New Jersey (LOL) was said to be so convincing that it caused widespread panic across the country — except, of course, the legend is an exaggeration. Scholarship after the fact revealed the panic to almost certainly be far less widespread than originally mythologized.
The not-so-straightforward legacy of the radio play was explored by Radiolab in 2013 and shortly after by On the Media in 2015, marking it as a kind of urtext with respect to the relationship between radio, fact, fiction, and the porous veil of collective reality. The specter of the broadcast is being revisited once again by Criminal, which is currently doing a two-parter on what you could broadly categorize as “documentary hoaxes.†(Disclosure: Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.) The second part, which drops Friday, is an adaptation of a Radio Ambulante story about a 1949 staging of the War of the Worlds radio play in Ecuador, which really did cause unambiguous widespread panic … and, unfortunately, several deaths in the aftermath.
That installment, which will be the podcast’s 200th episode (congrats!), follows an opening chapter about an infamous BBC television special that aired on Halloween night in 1992. Called Ghostwatch, the 90-minute scripted drama follows members of a fictionalized BBC crew as they spend a night in a spooky London home hoping to capture evidence of paranormal phenomena … which they do. The show was presented in the form of a live nonfiction television special — a popular genre at the time — featuring interstitials of real people telling their personal experiences with ghosts, complete with the renowned broadcast journalist Michael Parkinson serving as host. The drama opened with a disclaimer informing viewers that what they were about to see was a work of fiction, but here’s the thing about linear television, in case you forgot: If you miss the first few minutes, that’s it.
And as it turned out, lots of British viewers missed those first few minutes. I’ll let you dig into the episode to discover what happened, but given the long shadow of War of the Worlds, you can roughly guess. (By the way, Ghostwatch has been made somewhat limited in its availability these days, but you can watch the whole thing on the Internet Archive. It’s really well done, and it’s wild to consider that The Blair Witch Project debut two years later.)
I loved this story, though I should say I’m prone to loving this type of thing in general — call it the “pseudo-documentary gone rogue†story or whatever. It’s not unrelated to my love for the found-footage subgenre; there’s just something that’s simply irresistible to me about a fictional work whose scope extends to the medium itself. After all, what is a “pseudo-documentary gone rogue†story if not found-footage horror that’s leaked out of the box?
Criminal’s Nadia Wilson, who produced the two-parter, likens the appeal of these kinds of stories to a magic trick. “Something unbelievable is real for a moment, and it’s as if you and the entire world around you get suspended in that moment,†she tells me. It brings a strong sense of delight, tickling the part of your brain that perhaps wishes for the existence of a more interesting world.
Part of what’s so interesting about these stories is what they communicate about institutions. As the Criminal episode details, a huge factor driving Ghostwatch’s reality-distorting effectiveness was the deep sense of national trust the U.K. placed in the BBC — a trust that was probably damaged by that controversy, per the podcast. Relatedly, it’s also interesting to note how some of these documentary hoaxes were framed as efforts to challenge blind trust in institutions. In the early ’90s, an era so thick with such hoaxes that the FCC eventually implemented an anti-hoax rule, a Missouri radio DJ aired a fake news report of a nuclear attack. Controversy ensued, and the DJ, who was later fired, argued that he was trying to make people think about the horrors of nuclear war after having heard enough listeners calling in to say that the U.S. should use nuclear arms in Iraq.
We are, of course, living in a time with radically low trust in institutions, and it feels as if the possibilities for documentary hoaxes have either dissipated or been supercharged against the context of rampant online conspiracy theories, depending on how you look at it. In any case, it also generally seems to be a good time for belief in the spiritual and the supernatural. Over at the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz had a fun column recently on Jack Wagner’s Otherworld podcast, which its Gen Z–heavy fan base reportedly regards as the “paranormal This American Life.†Lorenz intriguingly locates the show’s popularity within that general decline of trust in institutions among younger people, which has apparently yielded an associated rise in belief in the supernatural and spiritual here in the United States — trends that are discernible as ascendant topics and microcommunities on online spaces such as TikTok. A similarly pegged story about how to live in a haunted house appeared last week in the New York Times, where it was luxuriously filed under the real-estate section.
Given all this, you’d think that a documentary-hoax enthusiast like myself, so powered by a desire for a more interesting world where ghosts and aliens exist, would be feasting today. It’s strange: For whatever reason, that’s not the case. In fact, the last time I felt the same electricity of seeing something unbelievable presented as real turned out, in fact, to be very real: the Slap.
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The story begins with a ’60s-era document called Take Ivy, which was produced for the Japanese market by a Japanese team that ostensibly spent time in the States observing the local look, except that what they captured wasn’t actually organic — well, I’m getting ahead of myself. Just pick up the podcast. I forgot what fun nonfiction narration sounded like.
➽ True-crime heads are probably well plugged into this show, but in case you’ve been coasting: Bone Valley seems to be picking up a fair bit of buzz. Led by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gilbert King, the series is an investigative podcast in the wrongful-conviction-procedural mold that’s centered around the 1987 murder of Michelle Schofield. Her husband, Leo, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the crime — and remains in prison despite long-generated evidence strongly pointing to another person.
I haven’t dug into the series beyond the first episode yet, but I’ve been hearing chatter about it for weeks. Bone Valley runs for nine episodes, and it’s due to wrap November 9.
➽ Sold a Story is a new audio-documentary series that can be pretty wonky if you’re not already invested in the subject of early reading education, and it’s to the credit of Emily Hanford, a senior education correspondent for American Public Media, that things are kept accessible.
The central idea is this: We’re currently more than a generation deep into a method of teaching reading that’s based on a flawed idea — specifically, what’s called “whole-language theory†— and it’s hurting education outcomes. Here, Hanford builds upon her long-cultivated body of reporting on what’s colloquially known as the “reading wars,†and for those unfamiliar with the history of this dense subject like myself, Sold a Story comes across as a great primer at the very least.
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➽ Canción Exploder, the Spanish-language spinoff of Song Exploder, wrapped up its first season last week.
➽ The Planet Money team is currently producing a miniseries that documents its attempt to start a record label as a way to explore the modern shape of the music business. It’s a neat throwback to the grand T-shirt experiment of yore … which is almost a decade old now? Yikes.