Podcasts are hot, hot, hot as TV adaptations
âItâs become much bigger than we expected. Weâre kind of like the dog who caught the car.â
By Mark Shanahan Globe Staff,Updated January 21, 2021, 3:33 p.m.
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Lesley Becker//Globe staff
For years, Hollywood has mined books and long-form journalism to create successful television. Think âWestworld,â âThe Leftovers,â âBig Little Lies,â and âMcMillions,â all of which started on the printed page.
Increasingly, though, the search for compelling source material is leading TV producers to adapt podcasts, audio stories whose established narratives and built-in audiences make them a good bet for the small screen.
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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: The groundbreaking comic strip Doonesbury has been with us for half a century. Its willingness to tackle social issues, politics and war made it the first daily comic strip to win a Pulitzer Prize. Doonesbury has also been censored for some of those same reasons. To celebrate the strip s 50th anniversary, there s a new book that includes a thumb drive with all 15,000 strips. Jon Kalish spoke with its creator and prepared this report.
JON KALISH, BYLINE: Doonesbury started when Garry Trudeau was a junior at Yale. It was originally called Bull Tales, and it caught the attention of a fledgling newspaper syndicate. Trudeau says he was told the drawing and lettering needed work, but it read like dispatches from the front lines of the counterculture.