NPRmageddon is a ten-part post-apocalyptic sci-fi arthouse radio show audio drama adjective-rich podcast in the style of public radio, broadcast from the United States of Lost Angeles. Featuring human interest stories, non-human violence stories, regime-approved propaganda and traffic reports. It’s a tough, brain-sickening, uncompromising work of art.

I had the opportunity to chat with its creators and am excited to share the interview with you.

B&S About Movies: How did you guys come up with the idea of the podcast?

Peter Podgursky: My comic book writer friend, Jackson Lanzing, told me about an audio series called Welcome to Night Vale. The show is very H.P. Lovecraft and it’s very good, but I wondered, “How could I create the Cannon Films version of this?” Something a lot more action-packed but with the conceit of it taking place at a public radio station. I called Bryan to pitch the idea of a post-apocalyptic, public radio-style audio series. And then Bryan said…

Bryan Keithley: You mean like an NPRmageddon?

Peter: I had been trying to come up with a title for a day and he did it in three seconds. He’s like, “Oh, NPRmageddon.” So that became the title! (laughs)

B&S: You loosened the jar of pickles for him.

Peter: Then we took a few months writing it. We got serious and with something like this, you get far enough along and it’s like, “Okay, this is a real thing.” 

Bryan: We wrote the whole thing, and then we rewrote the whole thing. We rearranged it because we wanted the story to be super solid. It was the writing that attracted a lot of the voice talent that we got.

B&S: There’s a ton of talent on the show! Who was the best person for you to work with?

Peter: The most fun we ever had recording was Harlan Ellison.

Bryan: We recorded at his house.

Peter: He had had a stroke, so we were worried. But he did great. He was one of the very first people we recorded, and he is in almost all the episodes.

Bryan: Yeah, eight out of ten.

Peter: We went into that house like, “Okay, this guy had a stroke the year prior. Is this session going to be usable?” And you know, gosh darn it, he gave us the goods! We hired him and he did not mess around. He told us, “You’ve hired me for a job. I’m gonna do that job to the best of my ability.”  So it was all very professional.

Bryan: And he critiqued our writing over and over. “You shouldn’t have written it like this.” (laughs)

Peter: It was such a wild, great time that almost all the other sessions paled in comparison. Nothing was going to be quite as magical as going to Harlan Ellison’s house. He was just tearing our script up and down as he recorded it. He’s insulting us and taking a certain amount of glee in our panic. (laughs)

Bryan: I think he knew that we were nervous. We were in the presence of genius here. And I’ll always remember because he was correcting our grammar along the way. He’d say, “Why would you say “rise up”? It’s redundant. You don’t have to rise up. You wouldn’t have to rise down. You just rise!”

Peter: The easiest person we recorded was Fred Willard. The recording session went by really quickly because we just had to record his parts twice, for safety. Man, the guy had done his homework.

Bryan: He was prepared, and it was such an honor for me to act opposite him. And I think another secret to working with a person like that is that we had him in mind for the role – as the spokesman for NPRmageddon’s evil corporation. He was such a great “used car salesman” type in all of his movies and TV roles, and he always played such a great liar. A snake oil salesman. And he just took to the role like a duck to water.

Peter: We have pretty good luck with actors. I think we got 75% of the people we went after. We were intent on gathering a very eclectic cast.

Bryan: A lot of the roles were written with a person in mind and then with some of the roles we said, “No, this is just a character we’ve invented and we have to find an actor that fits.”

Peter: Like Andrew Bowser. Bryan had written this great pop culture history segment and I said, “Oh, I know the exact guy we should get for this.” And I brought up Andrew Bowser, who I knew from his viral videos. He could nail this. We then spent the next month trying to get him and eventually did.

Bryan: He has a Micro Machines style of delivery. He can get a rapid-fire amount of words in, which the part needed.

B&S: What influences went into making the podcast?

Peter: RoboCop was a big influence because it has such brilliant media commentary in it.

Bryan: RoboCop is in the top five of our favorite films. That’s a movie I had on VHS and I watched like 100 times and as far as the black comedy and satirical aspects of it, you can trace back to certain sketches of NPRmageddon. That, and Starship Troopers.

B&S: A lot of Paul Verhoeven…

Peter: I do like his comedy and his biting satire. And another influence was the work of Walter Lippmann. His book Public Opinion is about the media and about how the sausage is made. And Edward Bernays, who wrote a book called Propaganda, which is about the joys and uses of propaganda. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and his big media accomplishment was convincing women they could smoke cigarettes, too. “You can do it, too, baby!”

Bryan: I’m a lifelong gamer and I love the Fallout video games. In several of them, there are even radio stations. You can tune into radio stations as you walk through the game world. And my day job is in game design. I’ve always cherished that type of post-apocalyptic humor – you know, finding the humor and the hubris and the humanity in a shattered post-apocalyptic landscape. The setting fascinates me and I think we found a lot of material that way as we wrote the episodes. 

B&S: Did you write it pre-pandemic?

Peter: Yes.

Bryan:  We recorded it bit by bit depending on the actors’ availability. Then COVID hit and we didn’t want to release this post-apocalyptic show when it was feeling like the real thing! So we sat on it for close to two years.

B&S: Was it strange for you to spend so much time in your fictional end of the world and then have to live it?

Peter: It was hilarious. Something would happen on the news that would be similar to something that we wrote. We have this bit where this revolutionary named Guitarro is tearing down statues, right? And our reference to that was stuff that happened in Communist countries where they were tearing down statues of Lenin. And then we saw statues of Confederate soldiers being torn down during COVID. And it just like the sketch we wrote… it wasn’t all that safe. There was one guy who got paralyzed when a statue fell on him and now he can’t walk. It’s really dangerous to pull down giant statues!

Bryan: We were never going to write about Trump versus Biden or something like that. We never dipped into actual politics and actual people because this is a fantasyland, right? Like, who knows how long in the future it will be heard? So we made a conscious effort to not do something like dunk on Sarah Palin because that’s not going to be relevant in three years.

Peter: I’ll listen to an episode of The Shadow – some of them are nearly a hundred years old. And it still smokes, right? When you’re creating an audio piece, you can think to yourself, “Would it be possible for someone to listen to this in a hundred years and still get something out of it?” And I hope we accomplished that.

Bryan: We connect ourselves DNA-wise to those old radio plays. Like Peter said, you can still listen to those on YouTube and they’re still cool. The stories are timeless and then they’ll be an ad for cigarettes or something, which is interesting. They’re artifacts.

B&S: I like the show a lot because you’ve created your own world and the real world doesn’t have to intrude all that much. 

Bryan: We always wanted it to feel big. Part of that is we assembled a cast of over 80 actors so it was definitely something bigger than just a podcast. As the show visits these different parts of Lost Angeles, we wanted it to feel very big. It was important to us that we didn’t cut any corners. 

Peter: Beyond the cast, we had an extremely talented mixer named Amy Reed. Most podcasts don’t have professional mixes, but we wanted NPRmageddon to sound extraordinary. I would stack our show against anyone else’s. I don’t care how much money you’re pouring into it, you’re not going to sound better.

Bryan: We were very ambitious with many of the science fiction sketches, with people transforming into monsters or getting their heads ripped off or gigantic beasts in the ocean battling each other. We did not limit ourselves. And that’s the fun of being purely audio. You do not have to limit yourself like you would if we were trying to do this as a live-action movie.

B&S: It has the feel of NPR without being a complete parody of just NPR, so you don’t need to be a fan of their programming to understand the humor.

Bryan: Yes! Early on, we refused to confine ourselves to just being a parody of NPR.

Peter: And actually, it’s the people who watch your show and read your blog and watch your streams who I think will truly enjoy NPRmageddon. We’re making efforts to find our crowd and connect with them in places like your site. One of the people who have helped us find that audience is Hart D. Fisher, who was one of our actors. He has a channel named American Horrors on Roku. Some of our most ardent fans discovered us by watching our ads on Hart’s movie channel.

I had a blast talking with Peter and Bryan. The show is a ton of fun and you should definitely listen, particularly if you love post-apocalyptic movies. Check out the show now at NPRmageddon!