Friday Check-In: Adventures in audiobooking

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This week's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as a cereal enthusiast uses a shovel...

Catching up

Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:

On the latest episode of TV Is Good, Kathryn and I wrestled with our feelings about the return of Ted Lasso, then looked back at another feel-good sports dramedy, Aaron Sorkin's TV debut, Sports Night:

I reviewed the new season of Reacher, in which the show seems to have really hit its stride in taking advantage of star Alan Ritchson's greatest strength (aka being really freaking big):

I recapped this week's Ted Lasso, where Ted got to meet his new players, and his reluctant new assistant coach:

For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I did a written version of the Ask Alan mailbag, looking at shows that deserve to win the new Legacy Emmy category, why The Bear broke out as a binge, and The Shield versus Breaking Bad:

I recapped this week's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, a black-and-white Casablanca homage focusing on Una:

What's next?

Coming up over the next week:

Due to review embargoes, you won't be seeing my review of Lanterns until today at noon Eastern.
I'll be recapping that show, starting on Sunday night.
Lanterns will also be half of the discussion in next week's TV Is Good, along with a look back at an obscure favorite of mine and Kathryn's: The Middleman, a short-lived, low-budget, incredibly charming comic book adaptation starring a young Natalie Morales. (Episodes are available for digital purchase; I bought the whole season on Apple for ten bucks to prep for this.)
As It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns for its [checks notes] 18th season, I'll try to look at its incredible longevity in a new way.
A recap of the next Ted Lasso.
A recap of the next Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Odds and/or ends

There's a lot of promising TV coming up this fall, and probably sometime between now and labor day, I'll run through the shows I'm most excited to see. But one just jumped to the top of the list when its premiere date was announced earlier this week: The Lowdown Season Two, which will be back on October 14, with Tommy Lee Jones and Betty Gilpin, along with a good chunk of the Season One supporting cast (Keith David, Ryan Kiera Armstrong, Kaniehtiio Horn, Michael Hitchcock, etc).
Bluey remains one of the great TV miracles of this decade, and Kathryn's book about the show, The Bluey Years, is a joy to read, and I would say that even if she wasn't my friend, neighbor, and/or podcast co-host. It's not out until next year (around the time of my Wire book, which will make an interesting juxtaposition on the podcast), but it's now available for preorder.
When I reviewed House of the Dragon Season Three, I had seen the first four episodes, and assumed I would get around to watching the rest as they aired. But without a specific work task tied to it, I realized that whatever enthusiasm I had for the show was pretty much gone, even if there were a couple of strong episodes in that initial four. (Notably the one where Rhaenyra is wandering around the castle, listening to people's problems.) I only mention this because a few people have asked what I thought about where things went from there. Sometimes, you just have to know when a show just isn't for you.

How to talk into a microphone for a really, really, really long time

Serling: A Journey Into The Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary will be either my eighth or ninth book, depending on whether you count Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love The O.C. Of these, I've done parts of two previous audiobooks. Matt Zoller Seitz and I split recording duties down the middle on TV (THE BOOK), and for Welcome to The O.C., I read my narration, with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage reading their quotes, and a group of professional audiobook narrators playing the roles of Brody, Bilson, and company. Some of my other books either don't have audio versions, or they were recorded entirely by pro narrators.

I really wanted to do the full audio for Serling. I hadn't done the full thing before. I feel like with all my podcasting over the years, I've gotten better at the audio thing than I was when I did my half of TV (THE BOOK) a decade ago. (My main memory of that was the audiobook director spending the first day trying desperately to get me to read slower, then giving up for the remainder of our time together.) With all due respect to my previous books, I think this is the best one I've written, maybe by a comfortable margin. And after spending more than two years researching and writing, I felt so immersed in Serling's life and world that I would have felt weird if anyone but me was reading these words aloud.

I knew from my previous experiences that recording an audiobook is a lot more strenuous than recording an hour-long podcast episode, or even guesting on something like Blank Check, whose episodes typically run longer than the movies being discussed. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for the marathon feeling I got from these sessions. It was four days, about six hours apiece, but at the end of each day — and especially at the end of the last — I was exhausted. Sitting in a chair and reading aloud for that long is work. Some notable moments and lessons learned:

I'm not an actor, so I for the most part steered clear of doing voices. When I would read a Serling Twilight Zone monologue, I did what we called my "Rod Serling voice," which wasn't an impression, but me trying to get the cadence close to his. But when it was just Rod talking, I more or less talked like myself. The only other times I really tried to sound like someone else is when I was doing various bits of narration from Serling's Fifties teleplays, which generally had a classic Voice of God approach. (They even tried it originally with Twilight Zone! Westbrook Van Voorhis, famous in mid-century America as the narrator of the March of Time radio and newsreel series, recorded the original narration for the pilot episode, which was scrapped in favor of Rod's version.)
That said, when you do this for a while, you start to get punchy. Among my interview subjects was Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, who's unabashed in talking about the influence Twilight Zone had on his show. At one point, he referred to Rod as "a bloke," and I told my audiobook director, Cass, that the word sounded weird coming out of an American speaking voice. As a joke, I re-read the entire quote in a terrible attempt at a working-class English accent, and she briefly threatened to make me start over from the beginning, and do the whole book in that voice.
Julia Whelan, whom TV fans might remember as Sela Ward's older daughter on Once & Again, and whom audiobook listeners will recognize as one of the best and most prolific narrators in the business, once gave me a key piece of advice: posture matters. You read the text off an iPad, and you want it at eye level, rather than having to lean forward or keep your head bowed for hours at a time. I'm unusually tall, so even when I adjusted the chair in the studio as low as it would go, the tablet was still too far below me, and my neck started to really hurt a couple of hours into the first day. So, as you can see in the picture at the top of the newsletter, the engineer had to scrounge up a box to put it at eye level, which made it much easier.
I have no inside voice to begin with, and it's a miracle that our podcast editor Riley is able to keep my voice and Kathryn's at least in the same neighborhood of sound levels. But I was being particularly forceful for the first half of the first Serling recording day — as if I was being possessed by Westbrook Van Voorhis himself —to the point where my voice was already starting to fade. My director, who's a pro's pro, told me to just make things more conversational. Between that advice and me mainlining hot water, things calmed down for a long time after that.
The one danger zone was on our last recording day. As any singer or actor will tell you, dairy is your voice's enemy. So I went out of my way to avoid it and just have eggs or other non-phlegmy foods for breakfast each day. On that last day, though, I woke up to realize we had run out of eggs, or anything I could have for breakfast other than cereal, because I had been too tired for our weekly grocery run. Now in a rush, I stopped by a bagel place and picked up a toasted bagel with butter, which in hindsight was a terrible, terrible mistake. I got to the studio, and my voice was instantly a catastrophe. We had a spare day built into the schedule, and after 20 minutes of me struggling, the director was on the verge of sending me home to try again tomorrow. But our engineer had put a half-dozen bottles of water on the table next to the iPad, and I decided to down them all in an attempt to wash out the accursed butter. It worked! That's the day where my voice felt the strongest, to the point where, when I got to the end of the text, we decided to have me go back and re-record those first 20 minutes.

All in all, I think it turned out very well, but the listener will ultimately be the judge of that. The audiobook will be out on October 13, the same day as the physical and digital book versions. Preordering any version gets you access to the bonus essay about my favorite Twilight Zone episode, so long as you submit your proof of purchase.