Bridgewater: To Narrate or Not to Narrate

Audio fiction is exploding. A once strange niche often misinterpreted as an audiobook is now taking the podcast charts by storm. Recent Spotify stats suggest fiction podcasts have jumped 300% in the past year. 

Today, when a writer sits down to draft the audio fiction festering inside of them, they have an essential decision to make: to narrate or not to narrate. Now, that is a creative decision that nonfiction podcasts can’t question: someone’s sultry voice has to guide the audience through the labyrinth of information and spellbinding conversations with guests while delivering a killer ending. 

But fiction audio writers can opt-out. Not having a narrator is unquestionably the harder route to venture down. There are a myriad of successful audio fiction shows that preserve the narratorial conceit like Tanis, Limetown, and every radio audio drama from the 1950s. So, what happens when a show does choose to not have a narrator? What does it gain and what does it lose? Let’s look at a case study of a recent hit, Bridgewater, produced by Arron Mahnke and written by Lauran Shippen. Manke and Shippen take the route that forgoes the narrator. The characters will be guiding the audience from start to finish. It is an interesting artistic challenge; however, does Bridgewater excel at this decision, or do the listeners get lost in the woods? Regardless, I promise to be a reliable narrator through all this.

Narration in audio drama

When audio fiction writers choose to abstain from having a narrator, they embark on the creative path less taken. That path can easily become as dense and confusing as the woods in which Bridgewater is set. Narrators are usually an essential, unquestioned aspect of storytelling. When the writer wants to explore a world at large, the narrator is the guide through the story, providing perspective, showing us where to look from the inciting incident to the falling action. 

Podcasting is surprisingly visual and relies on the narrator/host showing us what to see by giving us pointed descriptions. Regardless of genre, in podcasting, we rely heavily on narrators to help fill in the blanks because we are exclusively using our ears to move through the world. The listener goes into the experience blindfolded and needs someone in their ear to describe the scene and tell us what to listen for. The narrator/host can explain something quickly, fill in the blanks, without making it sound forced.

In this new dawn of audio fiction, narrators aren’t necessary. The Bright Sessions, also written by Lauren Shippen, is an excellent example of a pure dialogue fiction show. The Bright Sessions is set in a therapist’s office and is a conversation between Dr. Bright and her unique patients. Shippen does an excellent job of providing depth to the characters and creating a larger world outside the room the two characters sit in. The show is contained. All the action and world-building happens through conversation. The world can get big because they are only speaking from their perspectives.

However, Bridgewater is exclusively dialogue and has the characters explore multiple areas in the world with some light soundscaping. If that is all the writer is giving the listener, that better be some of the steamiest, jaw-dropping, propulsive conversations and plot twists we have ever heard. Where do Bridgewater’s conversations land on the scale from bonanza to borning? Closer to banal. 

Narration in Bridgewater

Bridgewater is a show about an obstinate, objective folklore professor Jeremy Bradshaw, who is writing a book about the Bridgewater Triangle in southern Massachusetts. Bradshaw’s late father, Thomas was a cop who went missing 40 years prior and suddenly his badge turns up in the woods in perfect condition. Confused, Jeremy reaches out to his father’s ex-cop partner, Anne Beker, a hermit-like woman who everyone thinks is crazy because she insists that there are monsters in the woods. Anne is a bulldog of a woman who won’t take people’s bullshit while Jeremy is a rational objectivist who wants to know what happened to his father. Once strange occurrences start happening again in the woods, the skeptic and the believer go on an adventure in the woods. Adventure attempts to ensue. 

Since Bridgewater relies exclusively on dialogue, every detail has to be explicitly stated by the characters, from action to scenic description to feelings and new information. When everything has to be explained, the dialogue falls like lead balloons instead of becoming captivating conversations. Each conversation has to pull almost all the weight like a single horse dragging an entire freight train forward. The dialogue becomes expository and is a lot of telling. 

Show, don’t tell

In Bridgewater, the characters have to tell us what they are seeing, feeling, experiencing, going, what the weather is like, and big reveals, on top of talking to each other. Having characters describe everything they are thinking/sensing doesn’t mirror normal conversations and ends up sounding clunky and unnatural. 

If there was a narrator, they could peek inside the characters’ brains and explain to the listener what they are feeling. Or, the narrator can infer a character’s feelings from the outside by describing body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, etc. Without a narrator, the listener doesn’t know how each character stands, what their aura is, or have any other visual cues as to what is happening other than what is pointed out by other characters. When there is no one to tell us what is happening but the characters themselves, the show becomes heavy and the characters are sacrificed. 

Shows that attempt to explore vast swaths of their world need a narrator. What works in shows like The Bright Sessions is that they keep the world relatively small. The small conversation between two people makes the world feel large because it is contained. It seems that when characters step out of a room and begin to explore the larger world, there needs to be a narrator there to guide us and them. 

TANIS is an excellent example of narration in an ever-expanding fabricated universe. The fictional host, Nic Silver, cuts us back and forth between his discoveries, his feelings, his conversations, and his moving through the world. Miles never lets us get lost in the woods, even when they are upside down and filled with eccentric and supernatural surprises. 

Characterization in Bridgewater

It may seem like axing the narrator allows the characters more room to breathe, but in practice, it weighs them down more. We don’t get as much depth about the main characters when we don’t have one-on-one time with them. In plays, we get monologues or breaking of the fourth wall. In novels, authors can dedicate entire chapters to just one character. In Bridgewater, we get no quality time with any of the characters. When everything hinges on the conversation, it inflates the economy of the script and each word becomes far more expensive. The dialogue becomes superficial and laborious. 

Read more: How to Audio Drama: Your Characters

Bridgewater‘s quality control

When there is no narrator, the writer must rely heavily, if not exclusively, on dialogue. 

The dialogue in Bridgwater just isn’t that captivating. The conversations sound like they were copied/pasted into each script. In every episode, Anne and Jeremy get into the same argument on whether or not there is something in the woods. It is constantly explaining everything and without a narrator to jump in and clear up any confusion, the characters themselves get lost and lack depth. 

I would argue that the creators relied too heavily on dialogue because there wasn’t any clear delineation between scenes. There was no music cue or twinkle of knowing that the characters were in a different time and space until one of the characters started speaking and explaining where they were. 

However, that could be redeemable if the voice actors were excellent, the sound design was original and spine-tingling, and the plot was propulsive. But it was all average. There wasn’t anything remarkably terrible about it, it was listenable, but it wasn’t bewitching either. The sound design was a little lackluster, the audio equivalent of drawing with Crayola crayons. The creators also snagged some bigger-name movie and television actors, but unfortunately, it sounded like they were instructed to sound like they were telling a children’s story. Ultimately, if the writing is poor, no famous actor or sound designer can cover it up. 

Final rant: the plot was remarkably similar to Faerie, Terry Miles’s newest show: cults in the forest, demons that are human-like and sometimes malicious, getting lost in the woods, and skeptical, rational protagonists. However, what Miles does that Shippen did not is that Faerie is centered around the protagonist, Ryan Bailey, who narrates her feelings, behind the scenes, and general explanations to keep the show going. 

Conclusion

Did Mankhe and Shippen succeed with their original intention to create an immersive, enrapturing plot that made you believe in something more beyond the veil? Kind of. Narrators are useful guides in audio fiction. Without it, it feels like we are groping in the back of a cave, in the middle of the night, in the dead of an Icelandic winter: It’s dark, and we don’t know where we are going.