Podcasts as lorecasts

Paula Mejía on why podcasts are the new Blu-ray extras.

Last week, I was sitting inside a friend’s snug Mojave Desert home when high winds kicked up and knocked the internet out. My fiancé and I played several rounds of Lotería, listened to records for hours, and reached a frustrating stopping point on our 1000-piece puzzle; the dramatic flurry outside called for something moody to watch. Luckily, there were a handful of Blu-rays lying around, including cult films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Cry-Baby, and Wild at Heart. David Lynch it was.

When I popped the disc into the Blu-ray drive I felt a potent nostalgia, though it had nothing to do with Lynch’s campy dialogue or the flawlessly-framed shots of roadside Americana. The Blu-ray disc itself, brimming with extras, interviews, and deleted scenes on the menu screen, dislodged a lost memory: I’d forgotten how fun these ubiquitous pieces of ephemera used to be. By sitting alongside the film itself, Blu-ray and DVD extras—often featuring crew members not typically interviewed during a film’s press run—not only lent a reverent weight to the people who make the byzantine process of filmmaking happen, but also offered intrepid viewers an opportunity to dig in a little deeper. 

A few days later, back home and catching up on programs you can only watch with working Wi-Fi, I thought about the lost art of Blu-ray extras again when I got up to speed on Severance. Every Friday, the show’s executive producer/occasional director Ben Stiller and lead actor Adam Scott drop an hourish-long podcast wherein they dish about that week’s specific episode, stepping carefully over any potential spoilers while cutting it up with Severance stars like Tramell Tillman (Mr. Milchick) and cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné. 

Much of the podcast involves actors talking in-depth about the craft itself—particularly how they prepared for especially challenging scenes, and the technical realities of the programmable robotic arms on the camera rig that have helped the hallway sequences of Severance become so stressful to watch. Following the most recent episode, the divisive Mrs. Cobel-centered release “Sweet Vitriol,” the pair had Patricia Arquette on the podcast and marveled at how she had emitted a guttural cry-moan in one scene. 

It “sounded to me, weirdly, like a whale?” Stiller says. “Like a whale in the ocean sound. It was a wail and a whale, the animal.” Arquette concurs. “There’s a whole conversation about the sound of keening. The crying, that weeping, that women do” related to loss, she added. “What is that kind of sound? There is a spiritual kind of power in that sound.” Clips of the show are interspersed throughout, and each episode ends with the hosts answering fan questions and Zach Cherry, who plays Dylan, predicting what might happen next on the show. 

Podcasts like these are a shrewd move for a show that has inspired so much lore. Supplemental offerings like The Severance Podcast aren’t just creating galaxy-brain content that syncs with the Apple TV hit’s meticulous world-building. They are also winking back at the extremely online, extremely dedicated Severance fan community who often create intricate videos unfurling their wildest fan theories, such as how the different Lumon elevator musical tones foreshadowed a huge twist in this season. In this way, niche podcasts like the Yellowstone and It’s Always Sunny podcasts, which pull on thematic threads and unpack crucial moments in these shows, are the spiritual successor to Blu-ray extras accompanying physical releases. 

That’s not to say Blu-ray extras are dead. The Criterion Collection, in particular, still places value on these extras and includes them in their coveted releases of new films and re-mastered takes on obscure gems. There are niche but fervent fan communities surrounding Blu-rays, too. And within the last few years, conversations about the importance of hanging on to physical releases have also ticked up, as both a means of weathering the whims of streaming consolidations and digital decay. 

While there’s still a strong fanbase for physical media, it’s minuscule compared to the digital and theatrical markets. The 2021 THEME report from the Motion Picture Association noted that physical releases in the U.S. made up just 8% of that market share, accounting for $2.8 billion, compared to nearly 30 billion dollars generated by digital markets (or 80%). Meanwhile, podcasts—especially “always on” podcasts that drop weekly or even daily for much of the year—continue to enjoy cultural dominance: Spotify’s most recent podcast trend report showed that the number of podcast shows streamed per person, in the U.S., has jumped over 15% year over year, with arts-focused podcasts accounting for one of the fastest-growing podcast categories for Gen Z (23%). It’s also paying off in a financial sense: PricewaterhouseCoopers’s latest U.S. Podcast Advertising Revenue study projected that podcast ad revenue is on track “to approach the $2.6 billion mark by 2026.” 

In recent years, the traditional chat podcast format has been dominated by celebrity voices, particularly with stars interviewing other stars. But there’s a growing sense of fatigue with these takes, and the saturation is also creating a more practical problem: “The proliferation of interview pods now means there are not enough guests to go around and all the hosts have started interviewing each other,” The Guardian noted in their recent story about celebrity on celebrity podcasts. But slight deviations from that format are proving to be popular, evidenced by the massive success of Podcrushed, featuring Penn Badgley and two non-celebs interviewing people: The podcast has 700,000+ followers on TikTok, reports the NYT. 

Which is where tentpoles like The Severance Podcast come in. The podcast at once leverages known stars while heel-turning from the typical celeb-on-celeb interview, offering hyperniche content about an especially brain-bending show. As the Dallas-based Infinite Agency has noted, the more niche the podcast, the more loyal listeners tend to be. 

While it looks different from the days of digging up a remote to click on the Blu-ray extra, these granular podcasts signal that humanity’s unyielding desire to further peel back layers of lore remains intact. The work, after all, is mysterious and important. 📀

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