Like all good private eye stories, the new Audible audio drama Unlicensed takes place in spaces just off the side of the screen: within the labyrinth of insurance policies, on the asphalt of construction sites, in the air-conditioning of an idling car. Lou (Lusia Strus), the titular unlicensed professional, runs a firm that mostly doesn’t service clients directly but operates as a subcontractor for a glitzier company. The mysteries of Unlicensed play out under the long shadow of a big city, but more often than not, simply paying the bills is the predominant issue.
The city in question is Los Angeles as observed by Welcome to Night Vale’s Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. (They write the series with Brie Williams, Glen David Gold, and Aliee Chan.) The creative duo have long imagined Night Vale — a fantastical fictional desert locale where, famously, all conspiracy theories are true — with loving detail, and they carry that sense of geographic attention over to Unlicensed. One of the first images features the narrator, voiced by TL Thompson, omnisciently following a commercial plane leaving LAX as it pulls up into the air and passes over the assemblage of mini-cities that make up the megalopolis of Los Angeles. “From the window of the jet, passengers can see the placid harbor of Marina del Rey,†he says. “As the jet turns, and the full stretch of the city swings into view, they can farther east. To the winding street of Ladera Heights, one of the few affluent neighborhoods where Black people could live in relative safety for a lot of the last century. Beyond that, inland and east, past chain link fences and billboards for weed delivery, past shops that fix auto glass and stores that sprawl half their inventory along the sidewalk.†Even in Audible, Los Angeles continues to play itself.
At the center of Unlicensed is a pairing of strange bedfellows. The narrative opens on Molly (Molly Quinn), a wayward soul, answering a classified ad that brings her to Lou’s doorstep. She’s looking to rebuild her life in the wake of addiction and a broken marriage, but first she needs a job to afford rent. In Lou, she finds an archetypal investigative savant of the eccentric sort, the kind who intuitively solves cases before anybody else and is capable of discerning patterns from disorganized piles of paper. Molly’s order meets Lou’s chaos; a master finds a student. You know how these things go.
I’m enjoying what I’ve heard of the first half of the season so far (all episodes are now available on Audible for paying customers), which has a proper noir’s customary loose, baggy shape. Eventually, I imagine, all the shaggy threads will come together to form a singular puzzle, presumably one that has to do with the halls of power and city government, but I’m content as it is to roll along the assortment of cases that have fallen on Lou’s and Molly’s desks, which include a mystery involving a missing teenager whose return sparks suspicions that he is not who he says he is.
Unlicensed feels a piece with the feel, language, and worldview that Night Vale heads have long loved. Of particular interest, to me at least, is the show’s approach to presentation. Scenes don’t play out literally or diegetically, but rather through an integrated mix of internal narrations. We constantly shift between the inner perspectives of different characters plus the narrator, sometimes within the context of the same scene or even conversation. It works for the material, removing the stammering awkwardness that sometimes occurs in the fiction podcasts, especially in productions that haven’t quite figured out how to efficiently communicate physical action. It’s a smart solution.
Anyway, if you’re in the mood to stick around subterranean Los Angeles (well, mostly), and if real-world grime is more your thing, consider picking up Infamous. Published by Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, it’s the new podcast shingle that houses the veteran magazine journalists Vanessa Grigoriadis and Gabriel Sherman’s efforts to unpack, as they say, “the downward spiral of American culture, one infamous story at a time.â€
The first entry, led by Grigoriadis and denoted as “Boy Gone Wild,†looks back at a mid-2000s incident in which Joe Francis, creator of the highly disreputable Girls Gone Wild softcore-porn franchise, allegedly found himself the victim of a kidnapping. (It wouldn’t be the only time, apparently.) From there the podcast uses Girls Gone Wild as a window into the American pop-culture landscape around the turn of the millennium, thus fitting neatly within the recent trend of shows and podcasts relitigating the more troublesome aspects of the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Here, Infamous’s recounting of Joe Francis’s rise is an attempt to sketch out how exactly we got to this anything-goes wealth culture that currently permeates the American pop experience. Maybe the series will ultimately get there in the aggregate, but for now, what you’re getting is a fairly salacious yarn. Consider it a vaguely elevated version of TNT’s Rich & Shameless docuseries, which, coincidentally, also tackled Girls Gone Wild early in its run. “Boy Gone Wild†tickles the TMZ part of your brain, but it does so with a sophisticate’s remove. Grigoriadis unspools the narrative with knowing-wink style and cool insidery-ness. (Additionally, “Boy Gone Wild†is a solid addition to what we here at Vulture are committed to delineating as the “Cool Girl Podcast†subgenre.) Pay closer attention and you might even hear a tinge of Gen-X judgmentalism to Grigoriadis’s narration, and perhaps to the Infamous enterprise as a whole, particularly as it pertains to Paris Hiltonian glitz of the early aughts. I find that sensibility fascinating in this context, mostly because I’m curious as to how the Gen-X worldview meshes into today’s cultural politics. Honestly, I have no idea.
Meanwhile…
➽ Dana Schwartz’s prolific podcast streak continues. The Noble Blood host has a new narrative series out on another bizarre entry into Hollywood lore that’s similar to her last effort, Haileywood, which chronicled Bruce Willis’s real-estate adventures in Idaho: Stealing Superman, which recounts an art heist that befell Nicolas Cage’s extremely valuable comic book collection. A fun romp, especially if you enjoy hearing about Cage’s many quirks, which I damn well certainly do.
➽ Between Trevor Noah leaving The Daily Show and John Oliver mostly playing it straight over at HBO, there’s been a general waning of the satirical political-news genre — particularly in the Jon Stewart–Stephen Colbert lineage — as a cultural phenomenon. The shtick isn’t disappearing completely, however. Big Money Players, i.e., Will Ferrell’s podcast network with iHeartMedia, recently welcomed Manthinkers, a 2022 take on the Colbert Report style by the comedians Dan Klein and George Kareman that wraps its characters around the intellectual dark web.
➽ Speaking of which, I’ve been appreciating The Divided Dial, On the Media’s new miniseries on the modern shape of right-wing talk radio — specifically how one half-century-old Christian-broadcasting institution, Salem Media Group, has steadily and quietly become a dominant political force and font for widespread misinformation. Reporting on this matter has been going on for a while from a wide variety of news publications, but it’s really nice to have the whole picture in one place, you know? The miniseries is led by the independent journalist Katie Thornton.
➽ A reader recently got me into AIN’T THAT SWELL, an Australian surfing podcast that’s … hmm, how best to describe it? Well, it’s a little inexplicable, so I’ll just let you figure this out on your own. Do I surf? No, probably never. That didn’t stop me from mainlining this thing all weekend, though.
➽ Here’s something new: Apple is giving out awards for best podcasts now, and the inaugural winner is Slow Burn: Roe v. Wade.
➽ Will I ever get sick of hearing about fast rises and faster flame-outs of the social-media elite? Probably not. I’ve just been made aware of a new audio doc on the matter called This Blew Up. It’s hosted by Alyssa Bereznak over at The Ringer, who last hosted a series about the similarly fast rise and fall of HQ Trivia, which I quite enjoyed. (God, HQ Trivia — the height of 2010s tech optimism, that thing.)
➽ Given that I’m still buzzing about Andor, just a quick-out to the one Andor recap pod that I stuck with: A More Civilized Age, which also revisits other Star Wars stuff more generally. I’m not a Clone Wars guy, but who knows at this rate …
➽ The late Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast is closing out with a final tribute taping orchestrated by his co-host, the comedy writer Frank Santopadre, along with Gottfried’s wife and collaborator, Dara Gottfried. The stream of the event will be available for a week, starting December 8. Details here.