Hear and now: How the companion podcast is helping with world-building

Tess, from The Last of Us, is clearly hiding immense pain. She’s all sharp edges and indifference. Then she stays back in a house full of the man-eating Cordyceps, to buy Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) time to escape.

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She is gone from the series (2023-) in the second episode; viewers never know her story.

But listeners do.

A day after that episode aired, showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann revealed her backstory, which was written but never shot, on the official The Last of Us podcast.

Tess was once married, with a son. She was forced to kill her infected husband, but couldn’t bring herself to kill her child. She locked him in a basement, and fled. She lives with the knowledge of what she has done; nothing surprises her now. Nothing much matters. Until Ellie turns up, her blood the key to a cure.

The HBO series The Last of Us is based on a survival horror videogame co-created by Mazin and Druckmann. Their podcast takes the series forward. It expands on this fictional landscape in ways that the show, with its limited canvas, cannot.

In the world of transmedia storytelling, this is why the podcast has become key.

It’s where Quentin Tarantino has expanded the world of his 2019 film about films, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Over the past four years, on Video Archives, he and Roger Avary, his collaborator on Pulp Fiction, have talked about the fictional projects and lives of that film’s protagonists, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). (Incidentally, the podcast is named after a video rental store that the two men worked at, in LA.)

This May, Tarantino announced on the podcast that Dalton had died; a subsequent episode was designed as a memorial / retrospective of his work.

Elsewhere, the Chernobyl podcast, which builds on the 2019 HBO mini-series, reported more than 10 million plays across platforms, by the end of that year.

And the official Succession podcast, launched in 2020 (the show ran from 2018 to 2023), is now a case study of the prime use of this medium. American journalist Kara Swisher took over from British-American journalist Roger Bennett in 2021. Her show, which concluded in May, analysed what the popularity of Succession — a series about the dysfunctional family of an obscenely wealthy media mogul — said about our attitudes to family dynamics, the media, capitalism and the “1% of the 1%”. Across episodes, Swisher interviewed Succession’s writers, producers and actors; invited real tycoons on to talk; chatted with whistleblowers and political consultants; offered her own and various analysts’ observations and perspective.

“Shows like Succession and Chernobyl are proof that companion podcasts can be a success with their intriguing and layered storytelling,” says Kavita Rajwade, co-founder of the podcast platform IVM-Pratilipi (The self-publishing platform Pratilipi acquired IVM in 2020). “Historical or periodical dramas in the realm of Indian streaming content could warrant good companion podcasts as well. They could provide a more immersive experience, help expand storytelling, enriching a piece of creative work.”

A good companion podcast serves, then, as a spin-off that unfolds in real time.

This isn’t a phenomenon restricted to the worlds of fiction. If anything, news lends itself even more powerfully to the immediacy of stories about what’s happening just out of view.

What did escaping a war zone entail, for Indian students in Ukraine? How exactly did a specific team of cops track down a specific pair of killers?

At HT Smartcast, the podcasting arm of HT Media (which also owns the Hindustan Times), over 240 shows across six languages and 20 genres (business, culture, government, true crime and more) cater to millions of listeners, dissecting stories of the day, adding layer of humanity and empathy to stories from the front pages.

“It feels a lot like the radio revolution, in terms of reach and access. Podcasts are affordable and inclusive, allowing people to shift between mediums with ease,” says Deepti Ahuja, head of content and production at HT Smartcast.

First Voice, Last Word, the weekly show by Sunetra Choudhury, national political editor at Hindustan Times, delves into the dramatic personalities and strategic moves of politicians, the history of padyatras as a form of political expression, the dynamics of political families, in a narrative documentary style.

On Metronome, music journalist Samarth Goyal interviews independent artists, explores the stories and symbolism behind trending tracks. What links the remake of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, by the band Fall Out Boy, and Man Se Hai Mulayam, the tribute song released by the Samajwadi Party for their late leader, former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav? Tune in to find out.

As Ahuja puts it: “Once you start looking for creative ways to say more about a story, the story unravels in the most exciting ways.”