Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg never meant for a Homecoming TV show to happen.

When they created Homecoming, the podcast from Gimlet Media, their only intent was to make a great fictional podcast, to tell an inventive story in the burgeoning audio fiction medium. And, to their credit, they did. Homecoming was a hit among critics — such as they are in the podcast world — and fans. Horowitz and Bloomberg also, inadvertently, made something even bigger in the eyes of television studios: a potential franchise. Two years after the podcast dropped, its television counterpart premiered on Amazon Prime.

Podcasts have been adapted for television before, but Homecoming is something different. It has Sam Esmail, one of the hottest directors in the industry, behind the camera, and Julia Roberts in front of it. It premiered to robust critical approval and earned three Golden Globe nominations. But the transformation of an audio-only experience into a high-profile television show isn’t the culmination of the podcast-to-TV experiment. Homecoming isn’t an endpoint, it’s a beginning, the crest of a new wave of shows that will soon flood TV screens.

“When you have popular internet things, there are definitely people who want to be part of that popular internet thing,” Jeffrey Cranor, co-creator of the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, tells The Verge. The podcast, launched in 2012, is currently in development for an FX show.

Podcasts remain a steadily growing cultural phenomenon, familiar to more households than in any previous year, and studios have taken notice. They’ve gobbled up properties left and right, not unlike the comic-book land-grab of several years ago. The first shows to make it to the screen were largely based on creative personalities, like HBO’s 2 Dope Queens, featuring Jessica Williams and Phoebe Robinson; the now-defunct Seeso’s My Brother My Brother, and Me, from the McElroy Brothers; and Maron, based loosely off Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. The property grab is still happening, but it’s trending in a new direction.

Among the podcasts that have been optioned for TV in the past few years are Lore, Alice Isn’t Dead, The Bright Sessions, Tanis, The Unexpected Disappearance of Mars Patel, Limetown, and The Black Tapes. While the plots of these shows all wildly differ, the one thing they have in common, and the thing that separates them from the previously mentioned podcasts that made their way to TV, is that they’re driven by stories.

Gimlet Media, the parent company that published Homecoming, noticed this trend early, and formed an entirely new division in their company to address it. Their first experiment in the podcast-to-TV field was Alex, Inc, a show on ABC starring Zach Braff, based on the life of Gimlet co-founder Alex Blumberg.

“Over time we realized that, creatively and financially, that wasn’t satisfying,” says Chris Giliberti, head of the TV and Film division at Gimlet. “We wanted to attach these products to different producers. After we’d gone through this learning experience, and watched a talented team in Alex, Inc put a show together, we felt like we had the chops to create it ourselves, and that’s the story of Homecoming.”

Homecoming is a  psychological thriller revolving around Heidi Bergman, a case worker at the mysterious “Homecoming Initiative,” and one of her patients, army veteran and Initiative volunteer Walter Cruz. The show jumps back and forth between the past — during Walter and Heidi’s time in the project — and the present, which sees Heidi working as a waitress in a town in Florida. The two timelines gradually converge, the past revealing the present and vice versa, with a conclusion that leaves the listener ready to dive right into the planned second season. (Homecoming was initially picked up for a two-season run, but a premiere date for season 2 has yet to be revealed.)

Though Bloomberg and Horowitz say TV was never their planned end-game, the show’s potential for that format was immediately undeniable. It’s tightly written, the characters are well-developed, and it’s already in a scene format.

That’s also true for many of the other fictional or serialized podcasts in development. The Bright Sessions, for example, mostly centers around a therapist and her various supernaturally gifted clients, while Limetown, a fictional Serial-esque show about a reporter trying to uncover the truth about a small town, is an interview-heavy drama.  Welcome to Night Vale, meanwhile, is a mix of soap opera and old-time radio show with a plethora of colorful characters who inhabit its world.

“They’ve already broken it out into characters and how they interact in a scene,” Horowitz says. “You’re testing it at a higher level than a book or article, and it’s easier to imagine or see how people are responding to it in a story. I think that’s appealing to people who want to test it at a lower cost.”

In short, there’s less work involved during the translation process. Studios don’t have to invest as much time in world-building if a creator has already constructed the world for them, complete with lived-in characters. It’s pre-fab content. As an added bonus, these existing worlds come with existing audiences.

“If Night Vale gets made into a TV show, there are already hundreds of thousands of listeners who will tune in,” Cranor says. “Same with a Marvel comic or popular novel. Podcasts in the past 10 years or so, the audience has really expanded, as have the genre of podcasts, to where there’s now a really rich fiction podcast community.”

All these sudden development deals do come with a big asterisk. As with any development option, a rights agreement doesn’t guarantee that a series will ever actually make it to screen. Development is just the starting line, and the path to the finish is a race without any defined length or course.  

“When you’re a playwright and you want to get a play produced in a theater, and you submit a script or talk to a theatre, you work with them, and there’s a yes/no thing that happens pretty quickly in the process,” Cranor says. “Someone put it best: in publishing, the answer is always no until it’s yes, and in TV, it’s always yes until it’s no.”

Justin McElroy, the oldest brother of the McElroy family empire, which includes shows like The Adventure Zone, Sawbones, Wonderful, Shmanners, and My Brother, My Brother and Me, says it took the better part of a year for the My Brother, My Brother and Me show to even have a defined vision. The show went through numerous iterations, including one based around pranks and practical jokes, which he didn’t feel encapsulated him and his brothers in the slightest. It wasn’t until they found producer J.D. Amato, who ran The Chris Gethard Show and the President Show on Comedy Central, that the show truly came together.

“It was like trying to find a new limb, that’s only overstating it slightly,” McElroy says.

That’s the hardest, most essential part of adapting any podcast to the screen, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction: finding a knowledgeable advocate, a writer, director, or producer who doesn’t want to make a show just to trade on the popularity of the podcast, but genuinely believes in its creators’ vision.

“With Night Vale, it was the one thing we were working on that was our living, and we didn’t want to sell it off and lose control over it,” Cranor says. It wasn’t until they met with FX and writer Gennifer Hutchison that they truly felt comfortable forging ahead with a series.  

For Homecoming, and Horowitz and Bloomberg, the person who shared their vision was Esmail, director of Mr. Robot. Esmail says he was hooked by the show’s similarities to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, and binged it three times. The opportunity to bring the podcast to television was too good to pass up.

Horowitz, Bloomberg, and Esmail all say that when they first met, they were nearly instantly on the same page about bringing Homecoming to TV. They all agreed that they wanted to preserve the series’ intimacy and character-driven nature, rather than shoehorning in cinematic setpieces that would take away from what made the podcast special. Esmail says they were “surgical” in their approach to each episode — what to leave in, what to take out, what to add, what not to add — to ensure the show stayed true to its podcast roots.

One way they kept fidelity to the series was by leaving the sessions between Heidi and Walter almost completely untouched. In the TV series, those sessions are taken nearly verbatim from the podcast — the same lines, even the same inflection. This was more than just fan service. Those sessions are the heart of the show, what gives it the intimacy that Esmail treasured.

“There were many times in the podcast where you’d hear Walter in a session with Heidi tell a story from his days in the war,” Esmail says. “This is going back to that intimacy that I keep hitting — that felt to me like a mistake to actually cut over to Afghanistan and show those sequences, because those scenes were really more about how Heidi and Walter interact.”

“I think the show’s kind of weird in that there are no fights or chases or explosions,” Bloomberg adds. “There was definitely some expectation that we’d open up the world and show some violence and give some physical action to go against all the talking and psychology, but to us, [the psychology] was the thrilling stuff.”

At the very least, Homecoming is proof positive that it’s possible to translate a fiction podcast into a major television show, given the proper resources and direction. That sole point of success is probably enough to hasten the free-for-all already occurring between studios and producers.

This will also undoubtedly alter the current landscape of fiction podcasts, as studios continue to invade this still relatively nascent landscape, panning for story gold. Until this point, fiction podcasts have been fairly experimental, as creators and writers tried to find new, less cost-prohibitive ways to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Their quality and success (however that’s measured) always varied, but they were always at least authentic in their attempts. That may change, if the podcast-to-TV craze continues apace.

“If you’re a TV writer, and you’re trying to find a new way to get attention to your story, you’ve got one way, the old-fashioned way, sending around a spec script and trying to get your foot in the door,” Cranor says. “Or you have a podcast, where there are people hungry for new stories, and you do it that way and see if it takes off. Now you have the attention of people who are looking to buy stories and they can listen for themselves and see how the players and characters interact. I think there’s a really fine line to walk there as a creator.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating podcasts with Hollywood in mind. Ideally, this new path to screens will just help a wider variety of creators break into an industry that says it’s desperate for diversity, but just can’t seem to find any talent. (Though so far the overwhelming majority of podcasts in development have come from white, male creators.) Still, the opportunity is there, in theory. Anyone with a story to tell and a computer to record can put that story out into the aether. More people than ever, especially those with the power and capital to make a show, are listening, and if the right person listens at the right time, who knows what could happen?

“This is America,” McElroy says. “Everyone thinks they’re going to get a TV show.”

There’s a scene in the sixth episode of Marvel and Stitcher’s radio drama podcast Wolverine: The Long Night where special agent Tad Marshall is interviewing a boy whose home was attacked by… something. The agent is searching for Logan, aka the mutant hero Wolverine, who the agent thinks might be behind the attack. But the boy swears it wasn’t a man; it was a beast — and a huge one at that. This is the first time Marshall believes Logan might not be the cause of all the murders in the town of Burns, Alaska, though he’s still not wholly convinced.

Meanwhile, the audience isn’t sure what to believe. This account notwithstanding, the evidence points uncomfortably to Logan. But he’s the good guy, right? And the special agents must be the bad guys because they’re hunting him. Except… what if it’s the other way around?

This purposeful ambiguity is the slow, unraveling mystery at the core of Wolverine: The Long Night, a story nearly two years in the making, and it might change the landscape of scripted radio dramas in the endless expanse of podcasts.

In April 2017, Marvel’s New Media division asked comics writer Benjamin Percy to pitch an idea for a new scripted podcast series with Stitcher. He was given only two vague guidelines: the podcast had to feature Wolverine, and it had to be an investigative show in the mold of Serial or S-Town. Marvel was probably expecting a one or two-page summary. They got something much, much longer. “It had character bios, themes, my take on Wolverine’s history in comics and film, influences I would bring to the podcast, along with detailed breakdowns of every episode,” Percy says. “I put an exhaustive amount of work into it because I wanted to make it impossible for them to say no.”

“At the end of that pitch was an asterisk with a note that basically said, ‘Give this to me, or else,’” he says.

As it turns out, the not-so-veiled (and not-so-serious) threat wasn’t necessary. Percy’s pitch was exactly what Marvel was looking for, and his 30-page bible became the foundation for the first season of Marvel and Stitcher’s Wolverine: The Long Night, which concluded its 10-episode run in early May.

“The audio medium is one that, for years, Marvel was intrigued by,” says Dan Fink, executive director of development for Marvel New Media and The Long Night’s producer. “It intrigued me to know how a Marvel superhero story would work in this medium. We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, we wanted to do what worked.”

What worked, according to Fink, were investigative shows like Serial or S-Town, where there was a narrator or investigator to guide listeners through the experience. This is why Wolverine isn’t necessarily the show’s lead character, even though his name is in the title. Listeners instead spend the most time with special agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall as they search for Logan in the remote town of Burns, Alaska, uncovering the town’s darkest secrets along the way.    

“As a team, we reference Jaws a lot,” Fink says. “In the movie, you don’t see him all that much, but everyone’s talking about the shark. There’s all this fear and mystery. Your imagination starts playing games. After Jaws, everyone was scared to go in the water, because you couldn’t see the shark. And so by creating this elusiveness [about] who Wolverine truly is as a comic book character, we were like, ‘Let’s bring this back, and slowly have him come back out of his shell.’ That’s what season 1 is about. It’s Wolverine coming to terms with who he is, and accepting the mistakes he’s made.”

Scripted podcasts are common today, but The Long Night is the first time a company like Marvel has centered a narrative podcast on a major flagship character. Fink says Marvel searched all over for writers for The Long Night, both within Marvel’s creative and editorial departments and outside. In a bout of serendipity, Percy’s agent had an office next to Stitcher’s, and when he caught word of the project, he threw his client’s hat in the ring. Though Percy, at that point, had only worked with DC Comics, writing titles like Detective Comics, Green Arrow, and Teen Titans, Marvel was familiar with his work.

As Marvel was recruiting Percy to write their first narrative podcast, they were also recruiting Brendan Baker, producer of Love + Radio, to direct it. While he didn’t write an exhaustive 30-page pitch script like Percy, he did submit a treatment discussing elements he wanted to experiment with in audio fiction, such as telling a story in two different timelines and working with unreliable narrators.

Both of these elements are crucial to the storytelling in the series. Nearly every episode features a flashback of some sort, whether prompted by a witness testimony or a conversation in a bar. Those testimonies aren’t always truthful, and neither are the special agents.

Baker refers to sound design as “designing an audience’s attention.” He and fellow director Chloe Prasinos were able to do that by using an ambisonic microphone, which records in a sphere, meaning it captures sounds above, below, and behind the mic. It also allows users to isolate different voices and change their positions in the mix, so listeners can hear things above or below them.

“One of the challenges of fictional podcasting or radio plays is trying to create an immersive experience for the listener,” Baker says. “In television, things are always mixed so the voices are in the center, and the side speakers are used for music or sound effects. But we knew in this case, most people would be listening through headphones, so we tried to create an audio environment that would be tailored to that listening experience.”

“Let’s say someone was telling a story about what happened to them in the woods earlier,” Percy says. “We could make the chuffing of the winds or the crackling of dried twigs beneath their feet, and sleet that might be pattering in their coat, and slip that into the conversation, and make the listener feel like they were there.”

The ambisonic mic necessitated a different method of recording the show. Instead of the standard “one-person, one-mic” studio approach that the actors recorded simultaneously, in the same room. The approach allowed for more interaction between actors, more like staging a play than recording an audiobook.

The final element was finding the perfect Wolverine. The criteria for an audio Wolverine is different than for an on-screen character: the actor didn’t need Hugh Jackman’s corded muscles or the ability to pull off the character’s signature hairstyle and sideburns. They needed gravel in their voice and the ability to intone rage, grief, and feral intelligence. Enter Richard Armitage, the actor who played dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit adaptations.

Armitage was deeply involved and invested in the character, whom he saw as an addict, someone who couldn’t get away from getting involved and taking action in any given conflict. Percy says Armitage sent him dissertation-length emails concerning Logan, citing works like William Blake’s “Nebuchadnezzar” in his attempt to get to Wolverine’s “beastly heart.”

Armitage’s version of Wolverine is more brooding and haunted than Hugh Jackman’s take from the films, or any of the character’s previous cartoon portrayals. (His voice in the role sounds like a hungover George Clooney / Doug Ross, circa season 3 of ER.) Armitage’s first extensive scene as Logan comes in the second episode, not in a cinema-friendly gory fight sequence, but in a morose recitation of a letter he wrote to an old lover, Maureen:

I came back home and found you asleep. It was hot, remember? You weren’t wearing anything but underwear, and lying on top of the sheets. God… do you know what my mind did? I saw every organ, every vertebrae, every nerve, every artery, every bone, every way to hurt you. That’s how I look at everyone, you know.

It’s a grim thought, but in this monologue, in a matter of seconds, The Long Night gets at the core of Logan better than some multiyear comic runs ever did.

Inevitably, Wolverine comes to the foreground of the series, especially in the last three episodes. (Even the shark in Jaws didn’t stay offscreen for the whole film.) Yet when Wolverine takes center stage and the podcast becomes a bit more action-oriented, it still never loses its initial premise and style. It features more punches and explosions than Serial, but even in those moments, the series never approaches the kitsch of the old Superman and The Shadow radio plays. It always feels like the same procedural.

Marvel is keeping its cards close to the vest regarding what’s next for Wolverine’s podcast adventures, but Fink, Baker, and Percy each repeatedly referred to The Long Night as season 1 of the series, and Long Night’s final episode has a clear lead-in to a second season. Marvel is playing it even closer about plans for a Marvel Podcast Universe, but Percy let something interesting slip to Mashable’s Laura Prudom:

“We have a fun opportunity here, and that’s to create our own continuity. A continuity that will grow more and more expansive as the Marvel Podcast Universe expands,” Percy teases. “There are glimmers that people will recognize, references to Weapon X and wartime Logan, Japan and past relationships that he’s had. But he himself is not able to really work through his moth-eaten memory until the conclusion of this first season.”

And while Marvel is keeping quiet about the possibility of an MPU, it’s easy to read between the lines on Percy’s quote, the positive reception to The Long Night, and the fact that fans want more Marvel content than ever. Like 2008’s Iron Man, The Long Night was an experiment in finding an audience and setting the stage for a larger, more cohesive story. From a storytelling standpoint at the very least, it succeeded.

Whatever Marvel decides to do next, it’s clear it’s found a formula for success in audio storytelling, one that’s easily replicable and adjustable across their many properties. It’s fun to imagine Peter Parker running an investigative podcast “produced” by The Daily Bugle. Or a show where Bruce Banner, separated from the Hulk somehow, goes looking for his greener half. Or a high school drama set in the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, or a world-touring espionage thriller starring the Black Widow. The only limit is Marvel’s imagination.