Throughline

Throughline is always excellent: thoughtful, well researched, adding depth to some topics and issues I might have only vaguely known about, or not known about at all. I especially loved the recent episode on the history of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a story I’ve always loved. Now I love it even more! Thank you! 🎄

The background music takes away from the content and is so distracting. I’ve stopped listening for this reason. Please stop.

Very disappointed in the LA water story. This episode made the common mistake of thinking the story is about the podcasters and not about the story. Don’t want to hear about the podcaster going there, they’re slow driving etc etc. The talking and giggling was so slow an drawn out, people don’t really want to hear this. Not up to the Throughline standards.

I occasionally try to listen to this show because their topics and perspectives are very interesting to me. But the direction and audio design are amateurish, bordering on bizarre. Listen to just the recent Dickens episode. Every voice has been post-processed in a different way, and sometimes one character’s voice changes from moment to moment; nothing makes sense; it’s distracting and baffling, and it makes me wonder how people working professionally in a storytelling medium which has existed for more than a century can have so like competency. Some of the actors are capable and natural, and some are not. I’m not someone who easily blames actors for bad performances. Performing artists need to be given tools to succeed, and it’s clear that nobody who is part of this show has ever recognized that good acting requires good direction. I don’t know why they insist on creating flimsy dramatizations of history when that’s not the wheelhouse of anyone on the staff. I also can’t conceive of any reason why experience hasn’t made them better at the format they’ve chosen. They’re still terrible at it, and their listeners need to let them know that they are falling short. From what I can tell they are mostly journalists and historians, and those jobs are important. But artists and creative technicians are important too, and there don’t seem to be any artists or creative technicians on Throughline’ staff. Mostly they just record what seem like single-takes of undercooked and underdirected readings of different pieces of old texts, and they believe that by getting someone to do a British accent and adding lots of reverb in post that they’ve done their job. I could go on and on. Please at least hire a proper director for one of your shows. Great theatre and audio directors are actually all over the place, and the most shocking thing about Throughline is that your producers haven’t stumbled upon even one before now. The ineptitude is staggering!