Toronto-based media company Antica Productions has been able to walk a fine line between audio and television production, thanks to a strategic move to blend the forms.

The company is behind BBC and CBC podcast Love, Janessa, CBC and Lionsgate Sound’s The No Good, Terribly Kind, Wonderful Lives and Tragic Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman, as well as Audible’s Wildlife Confidential, to name a few recent productions. It has been moving toward more audio content for the last six years, Antica president Stuart Coxe tells Playback Daily.

In fact, many of their television commissions, such as the copro with TellTale Industries and Anonymous Content Death Brokers currently in pre-production, started as podcasts that have been adapted into scripted series, according to Coxe.

Antica has been approached “multiple times” to adapt series and is fielding offers on that front, according to Coxe, including for its true-crime podcast Love, Janessa (pictured). He says Antica has taken steps to make their series more attractive to adapt, such as identifying possible arcs and characters that could translate as on-screen characters as well as providing episode breakdowns on theirs and affiliated websites.

“That’s really what the market has been telling us,” says Coxe.

Producing podcasts with an eye on future screen adaptations has “allowed different conversations,” says Coxe.

“To go to broadcaster and say, ‘this could be a film, this could be a series, this could be a podcast or it could be all three’ can really help a small undercapitalized Canadian production company, because our projects tend to have a better chance of getting across the line.”

“We’ve been able to sell projects into the U.K. market, from Canada, and vice versa, a project from the U.K. that hasn’t sold in the U.K., into the U.S.,” adds Coxe. “For a little company, it’s great to have that sense of global scale and audio allows that.”

Love, Janessa launched this past January as a seven-part podcast series hosted by journalist Hannah Ajala. It details the catfishing of a multitude of victims across three continents using a photo of Brazilian adult actress Janessa Brazil.

The true-crime series was developed and produced for the BBC and CBC by Antica and TellTale Industries, a U.K. prodco in which Antica has a stake. Following a pitch to CBC in June 2021, the podcast series was ordered that September.

Love, Janessa was pitched as “the biggest romance scam that has a face to it” that would take audiences on a journey to solve the mystery at the heart of the series.

“In audio, audiences like that genuine process of discovery. It works. And when it does with a project like this, you get just gold,” says Coxe.

While genres such as true crime, finance and lifestyle can be lucrative, it’s the ability to delve into the psyche of the host or their subjects that is key to connecting with an audience, says Coxe. That connection drives Love, Janessa as well as fellow Antica series such as Do You Know Mordechai? hosted by award-winning journalist and radio and podcast producer Kathleen Goldhar.

“Audio isn’t just cheap TV, it’s a way of creating something really different and special,” says Coxe.

That shift in perspective of emphasizing the unique storytelling opportunities possible with audio has opened the door for Antica to secure celebrity partnerships and launch a number of podcast series, including the Mandy Patinkin-hosted series Exile for the Leo Baeck Institute.

Not only is podcasting a way to explore niche topics that may not have scored funding for TV, it can also lure in big talent and partnerships. Antica’s partnership with Canadian public affairs journalist Paul Wells, for instance, has been a way audio distributors have weathered the end of the “audio goldrush,” says Coxe.

Through Wells, Antica has been able to partner with organizations including the Toronto Star, the Munk School at the University of Toronto, and the National Arts Centre, and secure Telus as a primary sponsor.

With less overhead for each production, relative to TV, Coxe says content creators and distributors are able to take more risks with a program’s contents and allow the talent to explore issues they are passionate about more conveniently and unencumbered.

Coxe, who wrote the pilot for Exile, says it would have been impossible to cast the celebrities and personalities that can be heard on its programs if they were on screen.

“On audio, the requests [from talent] are a lot lower,” says Coxe. “They don’t need to do hair and makeup, we can often remotely record so their time commitment is a lot less.”

The challenge as a producer, says Coxe, is to “bring them something that’s going to be really fun and that they’re going to be proud to be associated with.”

Image courtesy of CBC