It used to be original stories. Then came book adaptations, remakes, franchises, sequels, prequels, small screen to big and big screen to small. And for a while, optioning Vanity Fair and New Yorker articles led to films and TV series. The newest fad for source material that ends up as a movie or TV-series is podcasts.

It all started in 2012 with Comedy Bang! Bang! Then in 2015, The Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller talked about their plans to turn Serial, a successful true-crime podcast from Sarah Koenig, the power behind NPR’s This American Life, into a TV-series. Serial dealt with the lives of Adnan Syed, Bowe Bergdahl, and Hae Min Lee, among others. True crime, medical drama, political commentary, and science fiction seem to be the genres most suited for these adaptations. Dirty John, originally a six-parter from the LA Times, about a con-artist who meets a woman on a dating website and scams his way into her life premiered last year as a cable series starring Connie Britton and Eric Bana. Amazon’s Homecoming from Gimlet Media also got great acclaim – and three Golden Globe nominations – and is set for a second season. 

Zach Braff turned Gimlet’s StartUp into a comedy series called Alex, Inc. on network TV, alas it failed to get renewed. And HBO premiered 2 Dope Queens, taken from a WNYC radio show hosted by a former Daily Show correspondent and a comedian from Brooklyn. Not to be outdone, Apple’s new streaming channel just ordered a second season of Are You Sleeping – a story of how a homicide investigation was reopened thanks to a podcast – which is based on the novel by Kathleen Barber and stars Octavia Spencer and Aaron Paul. Apple is so confident in the project that it gave the go-ahead for season 2 even before the first one began airing. Back at Amazon, Lore that started as an anthology podcast of scary, real-life tales hosted by Aaron Mahnke, got renewed for a second season.

Up and Vanished, a special that aired last November on Oxygen, is based on a podcast hosted by documentary filmmaker Payne Lindsey about the disappearance of Tara Grinstead, a Georgia beauty pageant queen, and high school teacher. Writer/producer Jon Lovett hosts Pod Save America, a political show along with Jon Favreau, Dan Pfeiffer and Tommy Vietor who all worked under President Barack Obama. And there is more in the works. Gimlet has created a TV version of its limited-run horror podcast, The Horror of Dolores Roach. Over at Facebook Watch, 10 episodes of Limetown, based on a fictional podcast about the disappearance of 300 people at a research facility in Tennessee, just got Jessica Biel signed on as an executive producer and lead actor. FX has Welcome to Night Vale, a long-running podcast as well as book series in development. Director Sam Raimi is trying to make a TV series out of Tanis, another fictional horror podcast. And an adaptation of the sci-fi podcast The Bright Sessions is also in progress.

Some producers are convinced that the best way to adapt a podcast to the screen is to focus on one story instead of serializing them: Annapurna optioned an episode of Reply All in which a quack pretending to be a scientist committed fraud by insisting that there are medical benefits to transplanting goat testicles into humans. Robert Downey Jr. is set to star and Richard Linklater is on as a director.

All this is not new, of course: in the 1940s and 50s the executives of this then new thing called television searched for content, desperate to prove Darryl F. Zanuck wrong when he famously predicted “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

He was wrong. TV turned to radio shows for inspiration. And found it in hit shows that, now, no one remembers from the airwaves, but everyone knows from the plywood box – The Lone Ranger, Dragnet and Our Miss Brooks were all radio programs originally.

Podcasts are a product of the great digital democratization which opened vastly widened access to new and independent voices. And in the process supplied the entertainment pipeline with a treasure trove of tested original material.