Audio Drama Reviews: Three Years 100 Reviews: Audio Drama Review Collections, #1

By Michael L. Bergonzi

Audio Drama Reviews was founded on the principle of helping small audio drama companies get the word out about their audio fiction works. Rather than simply promote them, founder Michael L. Bergonzi took a different route. Reviews.

Three Years and 100 reviews later, this ebook was released, collecting every review published on the site.

Includes:

• The Leviathan Chronicles Season Two
• Seven Audio Dramas from Pendant Productions
• Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, produced by Dirk Maggs
• The first two seasons of Our Fair City
• Podcast Novel - 7th Son: Descent from J.C. Hutchins

And much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Audio Drama Reviews
• Release date: Sep 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386718741

Book preview

Red Colt: Bounty Hunter

A short little western piece that succeeds in both concept and execution. Despite the limitations of a short timeframe, this story had traces of an entire arc that take newer writers years to execute in a way that's believable and in character. This is a problem I have the most trouble with in my own writing. It's like that saying: Execution in storytelling is king, not how cool one's concept is.

The protagonist of the story played a similar role to that of John Marston from the video game, Red Dead Redemption. However the character in this story is in some ways even  more moral than Marston. Red Colt's flaw, at least from this episode, is that he can't let go of the past. He feels guilty about events of the civil war that he felt were his responsibility. The writer does it in one powerfully delivered line from the actor.

The concept itself is straight forward. A traditional western done in audio. While I haven't listened to a lot of audio drama westerns, I know they're out there. The price (yes, this one costs money) is reasonable when you consider that most songs are 99 cents or more and you get less content. Generally a song can be anywhere from 2-5 minutes. Looking at it like that, I think you get your money's worth. Basically if you're willing to buy a song on iTunes, you shouldn't be complaining about this costing 89 cents.

Decoder Ring Theater: Showcase

The Knightmare

An alright rip-off of The Shadow radio serials. The biggest flaw this story has is that it doesn’t do anything new with regards to that old time radio classic.

The acting was solid, but all the male characters sounded the same. In one particular scene it was hard to put a character to a voice, the dialogue was snappy to a fault, and the only character that felt fleshed out was the love interest.

The rest of the cast in that scene felt one dimensional, as if the writer just needed someone for the female lead to talk to. They weren’t characters they were set pieces.

Part two of this story doesn’t fulfill the promises made at the beginning of part one. In fact it twists the end, not once, but twice. This would be fine, if the twists didn’t feel like they were being made for the sake of the twist. The villain you think is the bad guy is not the bad guy. The twist after the "evil all along" trope is that the Knightmare knew something the entire time. There’s not even a Sherlockian scene of deduction where the protagonist puts all the clues together. It’s as simple as he knew it all along. 

Shinkei

This is one of those stories where the ending overstays its welcome, thus bringing down the would-be cathartic nature of the end. Cutting off right when the line from the opening scene is repeated would’ve been perfectly alright. Instead we get the same trick used at the end Psycho. It’s the 5-10 minutes where the psychologist explains everything. Exposition, done correctly, is a wonderful tool for writers. It can increase the depth of a writer’s character, setting, and plot.

However, with the ending of Shinkei, the exposition isn’t needed. The writer is explaining things the audience should already know, or that didn’t matter to the story in the first place. It’s also confusing to try and piece everything together. Do we really need to know what happened to the supporting cast?

It was captivating right until the big expository monologue at the end. The concept, characters, and production value were astounding. The ending just overstayed its welcome.

A Four Star Murder

The ending was borderline deus ex machina. It involved knowing who the last name of the culprit and the last name is a used as an unsuccessful attempt at a joke. A lot of things can be forgiven, but when a joke gets in the way of telling a good story, you've lost me. In prose fiction, if the author withheld information from the reader in a third-person limited story, then it's cheating. The same principle applies to any form of storytelling. If the punch of your plot twist requires withholding information from the reader, that reveal is going to feel unsatisfying.

The writer had a golden opportunity to twist the whodunit story on its head. 2-3 times we here the line you're wasting your time. If the culprit actually had been the person already in police custody, that would have been a nice twist. But the writer goes for the twist that's not foreshadowed and is a dirty trick.

Decorated Air Theater

This Thing of Ours Episode 1

The first episode of Scott Spaulding’s This Thing of Ours is a great mixture of first person viewpoint, production value and what can be accomplished in the medium of audio. The story plays out like one being told in the first person point of view. When used in film and radio, it’s often a cheap trick to give away exposition and is often times not received well by audiences. This, however, is an exception.

This show sets the bar way above other audio drama that use voice over narration, because most of them use it for comedic effect. This Thing of Ours just proves that you can treat this story technique in a serious way. There are too many stories that use the first person to poke fun at the fact that it’s a voice over.

When Carmine Santarelli is describing Joey 8 ball Scarfidi he just flat out explained how he got his nickname and the story continued. Most of the time a sequence like that would detach a reader from the