Well, it’s happened. TVWriter™ has officially recognized audio series (AKA scripted and plotted podcasts) pilot scripts as eligible for PEOPLE’S PILOT 2018 (with a special prize and lower than normal entry fee). A lot of our visitors, however, don’t understand much about them. The following, we hope, will fill in some blanks:
Jack Tracer: An Audio Drama With A Curious Style
by JV Torres
Anyone with a genuine interest in podcasts eventually happens upon audio dramas, which come in many varieties. Some have storylines ranging from lighthearted to ambiguous, but most have the essential elements that keep a story flowing. My curiosities always lead back to the plot, the setting, and the overall progression of the characters, though quite a few lose me in their filibustering narratives. Perhaps all those years at the university studying literature have finally come to fruition. The affinity for Shakespeare and the greatest novels and stories ever written sets the bar very high, as one might imagine. Therefore, it should be no surprise a person like myself would be finicky when choosing audio dramas to indulge in.
Audio dramas became a thing when I found some old CBS radio detective stories on podcast revivals. The horn lines dramatizing shock and awe and the ever confident detective stereotype had me hanging on every word. I could envision the offices, the bars, the clacking shoes on the pavement, running, chasing, cocking the gun, and taking aim before firing at the bad guy. The scenes played out so vividly in my imagination, I’m smiling just thinking about it. This is why out of all the many amazing audio dramas out there, I put Neon Nights: The Arcane Files of Jack Tracer in a special class.
It’s fair to state there are other very well produced noir style detective audio dramas (like the fascinating Roswell BC, for example), and many deserve to be written about. Right now, however, it’s Jack Tracer in the spotlight. This show delves into many offbeat motifs and peculiar themes including interdimensional travel, run-ins with almost human robots, and combating agents of the underworld (literally). Of course, there’s the complicated love interest Red (and her parallel world double, Scarlet), who both stabilizes and destabilizes the balance among the characters she comes in contact with. Such as the main character, Jack Tracer, who generally faces certain doom on a regular basis in order to meet his ever-changing objectives. He is either an adrenaline junkie or truly a “good guy” that simply has to do bad things sometimes to set things right -all while staying cool as a cucumber. At first, I thought Jack Tracer was a simple, one-track mind type of guy with a raging fire in his belly kept well hidden, but the more I listened to the show, the less I thought of him in simplistic terms and now realize he’s a logically sane person surrounded by a motley of bizarre individuals, each with their own style of hustle….