This toe-curling sci-fi podcast proves good audio drama needs more than money and stars
When we witness something incomprehensibly awful, we’re left groping at questions. Why did this happen? How could it happen? Who could be responsible for such a thing? I found myself asking such questions as I listened to A Better Paradise (QCode/Absurd Adventures), a new weekly sci-fi thriller podcast.
Three episodes are out so far, with nine yet to come. Some listeners might stick with it to the bitter end, but I can’t imagine A Worse Purgatory. Money has clearly been thrown at this thing. It has a cast of TV stars, including Peep Show’s Paterson Joseph and The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln. It sounds expensive. The press release claims a TV spin-off set “in the A Better Paradise universe” is already “in early development”. There was a glitzy launch party, with cocktails, in Santa Monica. (I couldn’t make it – I was washing my hair in Penge.)
But no amount of cash or acting talent can compensate for bad writing, and the garbled prose here is the worst I’ve encountered in any medium this year. Here’s the hero, describing the villain: “He was so charismatic! That dreadful charm! Those awful eyes!” A Better Paradise – or, to give it its full title, A Better Paradise: Volume One: An Aftermath – can’t decide whether it wants to be an audiobook or a drama. ABP:VO:AA has a cast of 12, but the pilot episode’s scenes of dialogue between them are brief and redundant, sandwiched by interminable monologues, a format that falls awkwardly between two stools.
Still, that is less of an issue than the hopelessly muddled plot. Explained in great unchewed hunks of exposition, it boils down to “company does bad things with AI, terrible repercussions ensue”. Lincoln gets top billing, despite having barely a dozen words in the first episode. Things perk up when Joseph chips in to chew the scenery as (I think) an evil AI called “NigelDave”. It’s a wild performance – half Shere Khan, half Rik Mayall.
In the pilot, though, we’re mostly stuck in the wretched company of Kurt (John Wick 4’s Shamier Anderson), a self-pitying tech bro. Here is Kurt, talking about working for a video-game company: “We were all sociopathic, altruist deluded monarchs, vain cretins in search of a cause to die for, an audience of acolytes to worship us, and – and! – a reason to live in this mad, mad world.” It’s all like this.
Yet Anderson’s phoned-in delivery means Kurt might as well be rattling off his CV. Actually, he does that, too. (“I decided to do a master’s in marketing…”) It’s bafflingly repetitive. It sounds as if written by someone who has never once used the backspace key. “And all this was after the collapse of the Western Mind,” muses Kurt. “We had already lost our dreams – to the machines?! Lost our dreams to the machines. But somehow people like me were above that. And somehow we’re above it.”
To explain how and why this turkey exists, I’m going to have to talk about video games. A Better Paradise is written by Dan Houser, and directed by Lazlow. (A mononymous director is a bad sign. See also: McG). Lazlow Jones – for it is he – worked for two decades with Rockstar Games, jewel in the crown of Take-Two, a video-game company valued last year at almost $23 billion, roughly the GDP of Malta.
Jones wrote for and acted in their hit Grand Theft Auto series, but for personal reasons left in 2020, as did Rockstar’s co-founder, Houser. In the video-games business – far more profitable than the film industry – these are big names. Houser was the lead writer on Red Dead Redemption 2. If everyone who bought a copy of that cowboy sequel were a country, it would have a population the size of Great Britain.
Now Houser has brought along Jones to work on his new company, Absurd Adventures, creating “original IP universes” – or stories, as we once called them – of which A Better Paradise is the first. Purely coincidentally, it is the tale of an embittered guy who left a major video-game company, and can’t stop complaining about it. “The worst of it is, we were going to be different from all the other technology companies. Then we were just the same. Then we were worse,” moans Kurt.
We hear much about his years “working for start-ups, big-tech internal start-ups, you know, the kind of well-financed divisions that try to obliterate the innovation of others without even dignifying the inventors of that innovation with a purchase-and-exit.” Oh yeah, that kind, we know.
