Podcast / This Sounds Serious

"My name is Gwen Radford. I’ve always been fascinated with 911 calls. Hearing a 911 call is like jumping into a book right at the climax. Then I try to figure out the rest of the story. But after all of the thousands of 911 calls that I’ve listened to, there is one that I can’t shake: the call that Daniel Bronstadt made to report his brother’s death has been rattling around in my head for a decade… Eleven years later, I’m still trying to figure out: who is Daniel Bronstadt?"

This Sounds Serious is a parody of documentary-style True Crime podcasts like Serial, created for Castbox by Kelly&Kelly. The first episode launched on May 1, 2018.

Journalist Gwen Radford is fascinated by 911 calls, but one call from 2007 has intrigued her for 11 years: Daniel Bronstadt reporting the death of his brother Chuck. The call in question is littered with digressions, Mood Whiplash, and general oddity. The podcast records her journey to seek out the caller and find out about his life before, during, and after the fateful phone call.

The following seasons have also centered around bizarre 911 calls, but still featured Gwen investigating them:

Season 2, Missing Melissa, starts with a call about a hostage taking at a bank in 2017 where the hostage taker, Jimmy Kline, accused the town mayor of killing his girlfriend, Melissa Turner, known as "the country's most missing person" because she has been reported missing more times than any other person in the country.

Season 3, Grand Casino, starts with a call from a movie premiere screening in 1991 where Jack Gray Jr., an old movie studio executive, suffered a rage-induced heart attack when the movie, Grand Casino, was nowhere to be found. This puts Gwen onto the story of Kirk Todd, the con man-turned-producer who pretended to make the movie in order to rob the studio of its $5 million budget.

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General

• All First-Person Narrators Write Like Novelists: In her dialogue, Gwen, the narrator, is much less eloquent than when describing her subjects and surroundings through voiceover.
• Mockumentary: The podcast is a "comedic take on the mystery and crime genre that promises to be both gripping and hilarious," and follows a similar format to true crime investigative podcasts like Serial and Someone Knows Something.

Season One: The Case of Daniel Bronstadt

• Apocalypse Cult: Discussed and averted.
  Ramsay: There was a guy in my cult (and I’ll never forget this guy) he was all like “I think we should kill ourselves!” And we were all like “Yeah, okay, Todd, you go first.” He didn’t kill himself, though.
• Atlantis: The Mandala’s goal was to restore the lost city.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Gwen figures out that "Daniel" is really Chuck, but cannot act on it because she has no authority and any records that could identify Chuck are unreliable since he and Daniel were switching places their whole lives. Chuck knows this and escapes scot-free.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: When WQOO got a new news chopper following the O.J. Simpsons white Bronco car chase, the reporter who got the coveted position was Tanner Austen, Chuck's predecessor as the network's chief weatherman. Tanner went on to become a suspect in Chuck's murder because he spent most of his time in the skies reporting on traffic and he kept asking for his old job back, but by then Chuck had become so popular with the viewers. Tanner even crashed several of Chuck's broadcasts and, on the day Chuck was found dead, tried to demand the weatherman job back before Chuck's body had even been taken away by the investigators.
• Boy Band: Daniel created a boy band in Florida which he mostly produced and ran. It went by several names, finally settling on "Flesh Boys." The group of rag-tag teens included:
  • The Bad Boy: AJ
  • The Momma’s Boy/Cute One: JJ
  • The Weird One/Nerdy One: KC
• Chekhov's Hobby: In one of Chuck's old TV segments, he mentions loving horses and even owning one himself. This becomes a major hint for Gwen that he killed Daniel and took his place because Daniel now raises horses at his ranch despite not having shown any interest in them in the past.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Chuck is and has been doing one of Daniel for years.
• Delusions of Local Grandeur: Played with in that everyone, not only the newscasters, treat the position of local weatherman as a highly prestigious, influential, and celebrity-esque position.
• Despair Event Horizon: Chuck hit a major one after Daniel impersonated him for a screen test for a national weather job, costing him a huge career opportunity; he became in noticeably lower spirits off-camera afterwards.
• Destined Bystander: In one of his news segments, Chuck visits the Orlando zoo Gatorworld and is accompanied by the tour guide Joey Fatone, a member of the then-unknown boy band *NSYNC.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Regarding the Weatherman Strangler case. The killer appears to have been the Albuquerque police station janitor who figured out a cipher the killer had sent, but because he died in a shootout with the police, his guilt was never fully confirmed.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The Reveal that Daniel was the one murdered and Chuck is the man Gwen has been talking to means that all of the interviews have an Unreliable Narrator.
• Fair Cop: In one of the 911 calls from the first episode, the caller wants one of these.
  Caller: So, like, how bad does it have to be to send a police officer? A male one. Six feet. Maybe blond. I’m stuck in bed.
• Fake Twin Gambit: Identical twins Daniel and Chuck convinced everyone that they were actually triplets with a brother named Evan. They were so successful over multiple years that "Evan" graduated with honors.
• Finger in the Mail: JJ, of the Flesh Boys, lost a finger working in a machine shop and sent the digit to Chuck, whom he saw as cheating him out of his cut for singing in the Flesh Boys.
  John "JJ" Carlson: I could’ve sent two more [fingers] over the years, but I’ve learned to let it go. [chuckles] I've let a lot of things go without those extra fingers.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Chuck is the responsible one, being a famous and well-liked weatherman, while the quirky Daniel is the foolish one who was in a cult for a while.
• Foreshadowing: The fact that it was actually Dan who died is foreshadowed by the stories of the pranks they used to play in school.
• Hostile Show Takeover: In the Finale, Dan (actually Chuck) agrees to return to the show on the condition that he gets to host it. He gives up after a few minutes.
• Kill and Replace: Chuck, to Dan.
• Meaningful Rename: Upon entering the Mandala cult, "Allison" became "Sister Alllison," and "Daniel" became "Brother Kai."
• Metaphorgotten:
  Ken Shaw: We think of a news broadcast as a sandwich. The anchors are the bread—gotta have bread or it’s not a sandwich. Stories are the meat of the sandwich. Sports? I’m gonna say they’re tomatoes. Weather is supposed to be the lettuce—women like it, but nobody else does. It’s not too exciting, it’s crunchy. Suddenly, the lettuce is the reason for our news sandwich becoming popular? It doesn’t make sense. The difference was, our lettuce was young and cool and handsome. It was like if you found out a sandwich had Christian Slater lettuce. That make sense?
• Mood Whiplash: When Ramsay is reminiscing about the man who first inspired him to create the Mandala, midway through he mentions that he died in a shootout with the cops because his cult went off the deep end.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: "Murder my Sweet" and its host, Deb Desouza, are a nod to My Favorite Murder with Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff.
• No-Hit Wonder: invoked Dan remembers people calling "Two + One" this word for word.
• Opening Narration: A very short one follows a "previously on..." segment in several episodes.
  Gwen: Join me for a journey inside the mind of the most fascinating 911 caller I’ve ever encountered.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: "Alison," a survivor of The Mandala, agreed to speak with Gwen on the condition that her real name would not be used. Her real name is “Allison”, pronounced the same.
  "Alison": My real name is "Allison" with two "l"s, but can we call me "Alison" with one "l"?
• Precision F-Strike: After a mostly cuss-free episode, Karen drops an F-bomb a little over a minute from the end.
  Karen: He joined a fucking cult!
• Psmith Psyndrome: Allison, aka "Alison," aka "Alllison." See Paper-Thin Disguise.
• Raised by Grandparents: Daniel and Chuck went to live with their grandparents when they were 14 due to their parents’ tragic deaths.
• The Reveal: Chuck murdered Daniel, and is the man Gwen talked to the entire podcast.
• Rudely Hanging Up: Daniel does this both to the operator when he wanders away to get frozen yogurt and to Gwen when he ends the conversation on the assumption that they’ll talk face-to-face when she visits despite her failing to get a word in edgewise.
• Same-Sex Triplets: Daniel, Chuck, and the fictional "Evan."
• Serial Killer: A suggested suspect in Chuck's murder is The Weatherman Strangler, a serial killer in the early 2000s who killed weathermen who made incorrect predictions about heat waves ending.
• Show Within a Show: Last Known Whereabouts, an Unsolved Mysteries-like TV show about murder cases. It comes up in Episode 6 when Gwen talks about the Weatherman Strangler. Despite, or thanks to, its low budget and hokey reenactment scenes (all of which where done by the same actors), it has become something of a cult favorite among true crime fans.
  Weatherman Actor: Hey, what are you doing in my condo in Flagstaff, Arizona? [sounds of a struggle and the "weatherman" being throttled] You're strangling me! You're strangling a weatherman!
• Spotting the Thread: Near the end, Gwen rewatches footage of Daniel's trial and notices something in the part where he made his opening statement. Before he delivered it, he muttered something to himself that sounded like clicking, after which he spoke with uncharacteristic clarity and charisma. Gwen realizes that he was saying "Come on, Chucky boy", the phrase Chuck used to say before he went on the air to get psyched, which in turn makes her realize that Daniel is Chuck, who killed Daniel and started impersonating him.
• Too Dumb to Fool: Daniel was interrogated for eight hours without really implicating himself despite the detective's sometimes leading questions:
  Detective: If-if Chuck didn't drown himself in his own waterbed, and he lived with someone else, and that someone else was you, then there's a very high likelihood that the killer is...
  Daniel: ...a ghost? I don't know, seems far-fetched, Detective...
  Detective: What are we doing here, Daniel?
• Trickster Twins: Including, but not limited to, the Twin Switch.
  Daniel: We’d play pranks all the time! That’s what you do as twins!
• Twin Switch: According to Daniel, he and Chuck were always switching places when the school tried to keep them in separate classes. Sometimes even they had trouble keeping track of who was where.
  • Played for Drama later when Daniel tried to break up Chuck and his wife and when Daniel impersonated Chuck during an audition for a weatherman gig at a bigger network, costing him the job.
  • Chuck is ultimately revealed to have been impersonating Dan for years after murdering him.
• Unreliable Narrator: “Daniel,” after Gwen figures out he’s really Chuck. It’s impossible to tell where “Daniel” ends and “Chuck” begins in his version of events.
• Weather Report: Some pieces of meteorologist, Orlando weather man, and Posthumous Character Chuck’s reports make their way into the podcast.
• Weird Aside: When Ramsay is discussing his time as the leader of the Mandala cult, the music pauses abruptly as he talks about how the man who inspired him died in a shootout with the police over his doomsday cult.
• Yoko Oh No: Daniel describes Chuck's ex-wife Karen as the Yoko Ono who ended their music career, but based on everything it seems unlikely that they would ever have gone that far and Chuck seemed to thrive more as a weatherman.

Season Two: Missing Melissa

• All of the Other Reindeer: As a child, Jimmy was bullied mercilessly by other children, in part because his mother was the mayor and in part because he was given his father's surname, Kline, and lived in a town full of Days.
• Broken-Window Warning: The proprietor of the motel Gwen stays at tries to throw a rock with a warning note tied to it through her car door window - but because she couldn't find the car, she just gives her the note in person instead.
• Close-Knit Community: The town of Tom Day. One third of the residents are descendants of the town's namesake, including their current and previous three mayors, and bear his name, and they tend to make outsiders feel unwelcome.
• Darker and Edgier: A bit compared to the first season. While it still uses the same sense of humor, the circumstances of the mystery are more realistic and played more seriously. There is blatant political corruption, Gwen is threatened and harassed, and one of the last episodes dissects the morbid appeal of true crime.
• Disappeared Dad: Jimmy's father, country musician Gordon Robert Kline, is not very involved in his son's life anymore because the town of Tom Day is extremely alienating to outsiders like him. That said, he was heartbroken about having to leave his son and was devastated to learn that he had been sentenced to prison.
• Downer Ending: Jimmy will probably be wrongfully charged with killing Melissa, and while he probably won't be convicted, the legal proceedings will be expensive and exhausting. Meanwhile, Melissa is by all appearances alive and in the wind.
• Failure Gambit:
  • When Rhoda ran for mayor against the incumbent mayor, her father, he barely pretended to put up a serious campaign against her; at one rally, he showed up in a pajamas and robe and pretended that his mind was slipping.
  • After the Palm Pilot factory didn't happen, Rhoda seemingly started to deliberately fail to set up big events as a way to make Tom Day even more isolated, hyping up a big festival the town would never be able to deliver and tanking a pitch for it to host a local sporting event.
• Faking the Dead: By the end of the podcast, Gwen concludes that Melissa probably faked her murder in order to disappear forever.
• Hostage Situation: Jimmy is a serial hostage taker, having previously created several smaller, mostly harmless hostage situations when he was younger as his way of throwing tantrums. The one at the bank in the 911 call was his most serious one, being the first time he brought a weapon and took that many people hostage.
• I'm Standing Right Here: When Gordon Kline was married to Rhoda and they were out in public together, townsfolk would happily talk to her while either ignoring or not noticing Gordon when he sat next to her; sometimes they even asked if she would be getting married soon. He specifically recalls an incident when he held baby Jimmy in his arms and people around them screamed in panic and said Jimmy was floating in mid-air, either pretending not to see Gordon or genuinely not noticing him.
• I Own This Town: Rhoda Day has a lot more power in Tom Day than any mayor should have, being a fourth-generation Day mayor after her father, grandfather and great-grandfather; helped by the fact that the town's namesake is her ancestor and about a third of the town's population is also somehow related to him.
  Rhoda: I have a lot of cousins in this town, okay? Do you know who owns the motel you're staying at? My nephew. He's a motorcycle enthusiast, if you catch my drift. So if I were you, I would stop asking questions, and leave Tom Day.
• Landslide Election: When Papa Don ran for mayor against Rhoda, he somehow only got three votes; one from himself, one from his wife and a third he figures was cast by Rhoda herself as a little personal "screw you".
• Luxury Prison Suite: The "prison" Jimmy was sent to for the bank hostage situation is a really breezy one, described by Gwen as feeling more like a community college or a country club than a prison. The living conditions are pleasant, the interns are on good terms with the warden and Jimmy was even able to co-host a podcast during his time there.
• Poor Communication Kills: Gwen theorizes that Jimmy and Rhoda both think the other killed Melissa and that they are covering for each other, preventing them from realizing that neither probably did it.
• Prisons Are Gymnasiums: Jimmy is quite muscular now, saying he spent a lot of his time in prison working out.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • After the bank hostage situation, the official story becomes that Jimmy didn't really know Melissa and that he just got her name from the news - except Gwen points out that Melissa didn't actually pop up in the news until a few days later when she was reported missing (her parents reported it late because of all the other times she'd gone missing).
  • When Gwen asks Rhoda why she wasn't reachable during the hostage situation, she says she was at a town council meeting and that those meetings drag on, they keep their phones turned off during them, that it was a long weekend and she left town afterwards and forgot to turn her phone on. However, Papa Don later says that Rhoda stopped bothering coming to town council meetings years ago, suggesting that something else made her unreachable.
• Subcultures: Jimmy turns out to have been part of a subculture focused around reviewing smells and scents. He even had a YouTube channel with a decent number of views.
• Show Within a Show: Here's Some Information, a podcast about Internet culture. A substantial chunk of Episode 4, "Subcultures", is made up of its episode about the smell subculture of which Jimmy was a member for a time.

Season Three: Grand Casino

• The Alcoholic: Grand Casino's supposed leading man, Vincent Carlyle, admits in his autobiography to have had such a drinking problem at the time (mainly on Slice sangria) that he didn't remember a lot of his work during that period and just played along.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Isabelle Broussard, the supposed leading lady of Grand Casino, was completely inexperienced when the movie was supposedly made, and it shows in her screen test:
  Isabella: Don't go anywhere! THIS is a GUN!
• Bittersweet Ending: Grand Casino finally gets screened and finds a following in the bad movie lover crowd. Kirk is glad that his movie brings joy to so many people and enjoys the fame of it, even making personal appearances at bad film festivals. Unfortunately, when Gwen calls him, it turns out that Helen has ingratiated herself into his life again as his assistant, leaving it up in the air whether he will stay honest or fall back into a life of crime.
• Con Man: Kirk Todd is a lifelong and very successful con artist.
• Copiously Credited Creator: invoked In the opening credits for Grand Casino, Kirk is listed as the executive producer, producer (yes, two producer credits), writer and director.
• Dead All Along: In Episode 7, it turns out that Isabelle Broussard died years ago in a car accident, raising the question of who Gwen talked to earlier.
• Fake Aristocrat: While in Europe, Kirk ran a scam where he pretended to be a member of some European royal family.
• Follow the Leader: invoked Kirk's, and his co-producer Blaine Cross, first big TV success was Emerald Motors, a primetime Soap Opera about the family of an automobile tycoon created to capitalize on the success of Dallas and its copycats Dynasty and Falcon Crest.
• Guilt by Association: After the scandal with Kirk and Grand Casino, Blaine's work as a producer dried up because of his connection to Kirk, even though he himself didn't really have anything to do with the movie and he was working on other, unrelated projects while Kirk was supposedly away making it.
• Hidden Depths: While a lot of Kirk's ideas for TV shows are obviously disastrous (such as a show called Fat Dads about a group of fat dads who solve mysteries), some of his ideas or shows were genuinely good (such as a Doogie Howser, M.D.-like show about a child savant who solves crimes), innovative (like his and Blaine's Beverly Hills, 90210 predecessor Pike Place) or had already been made when he came up with them (like his idea about a love story between a rich woman and a poor man on the Titanic).
• Lighter and Softer: The storyline of the season is less heavy than the previous one, in part because it focuses on a case of fraud rather than a murder.
• Master Forger: Helen Chatham, a struggling artist who became a very successful art forger to make money. She and Kirk became partners in crime, as well as romantic partners. In addition to selling fake paintings by old masters such as Picasso, they created a fake Eurovision Song Contest entry for Finland, which they did just for fun and which still came in third.
  • After they returned to the U.S. and Kirk became a producer, Helen, bored out of her mind living as a housewife, started making fake, supposedly lost early short films by famous directors, such as Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock. She made them using unwitting non-union actors and vintage cameras, then spread rumors that the films were out there and sold the reels to rich collectors.
• Never Trust a Trailer: In-Universe. When Jack Gray Jr. started sniffing around the production of Grand Casino, Kirk Todd appeased him with a very captivating trailer that made it to theater previews. Especially in light of how bad the actual movie turned out.
• Orwellian Retcon: After the fiasco with Grand Casino's premiere, the studio went out of its way to pretend the project never existed, issuing a company-wide gag order, pulling all advertising and cancelling the actors' talk show appearances; the movie doesn't even have a listing on IMDb.
• Padding: invoked Grand Casino is two and a half hours long, and apparently quite a lot could have been cut; Gwen specifically notes a scene where Vincent Carlyle's character teaches Isabelle Broussard's how to parallel park.
• The Paranoiac: Frank Reeves, a true crime writer who contacts Gwen and tips her off about the robbery at the casino where Grand Casino was filmed. Because his work includes books about the mafia, he is very secretive, writing under a pseudonym and getting Gwen to put on a wig and disguise herself when they meet.
  Frank: Here's how I know I'm doing good work, Gwen: people keep trying to kill me.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • The prevailing theory of how Kirk was able to get Grand Casino green-lit is that he took advantage of how much people in Hollywood relies on assistants to communicate. They don't usually stay on the job for more than a few weeks, so nobody remembers their names or voices. Pretending to be various people's assistants, Kirk got the script approved without anyone reading it, got the supposed final cut approved without anyone seeing it, etc. By the end, this does seem to have been the case, except Helen was the one impersonating assistants to allow Kirk to barrel on and make the movie without any real oversight.
  • As it turns out, various investigative agencies had parts of the story figured out, but because they were bad at sharing information, they never discovered that Helen Chatham worked on the production of Grand Casino using a fake identity.
• Real After All: It turns out that Kirk Todd really did make Grand Casino, and not just run off with the budget money.
• Running Gag: Emerald Motors is twice shown to have used the line "What are you doing with that gun?" when a character is shot. It's used again a third time in Grand Casino, during a particularly bizarre cliffhanger moment when a main character is shot by his own father.
• Show Within a Show:
  • Hollywood Tonight, an entertainment news program that was popular in the 90s. Clips of it related to Grand Casino are used throughout the season, and its host/reporter, Rebecca Healey, tells about Kirk and the con.
  • Rotten Popcorn, a podcast where the two hosts MST and review bad movies. Gwen brings them in to help her get a fresh set of eyes on Grand Casino when she gets her hands on a copy.
• So Bad, It's Good: invoked Grand Casino turns out to be hilariously awful with stilted acting from the leads, nonsensical writing, non-stop cliffhangers and painfully obvious mistakes. The guys from Rotten Popcorn place it in the same league as The Room and Battlefield Earth.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • The two supposed leads of Grand Casino, Vincent Carlyle and Isabelle Broussard; the former because he had worked with Kirk on Emerald Motors and was a known drunk who could be easily deceived by Kirk, and the latter because she was naive and had no movie experience and wouldn't know how a movie set was supposed to be run.
  • Kirk. His creation of Grand Casino was engineered by Helen, who used the filming of the movie in Las Vegas as a cover to rob the casino at which they filmed.
  • Gwen herself is one too; Helen's tipping her off about Kirk's supposed con while posing as Isabelle set her on the course that led to Grand Casino being unearthed, just as Helen's way of getting her story told and figuratively signing her work.
• Wham Line:
  • The end of Episode 4:
    Kirk: Grand Casino wasn't a con. I made that movie, Gwen. Grand Casino exists, and it's out there somewhere.
  • The end of Episode 6:
    Frank Reeves: Gwen, I've been listening to your podcast with great intrigue. But you are way, way of the mark. The movie that you've been chasing isn't the real story. The movie was just a front for another crime. Because the casino where they shot that movie was robbed.
  • The last line of Episode 7:
    Kirk: Uh... Gwen, Isabelle died in a car crash 20 years ago.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: In-Universe. With Emerald Motors, Kirk and Blaine copied Dallas' "Who Shot J.R.?" mystery by having someone shot in every single episode. According to the show's casting director, they shot 32 lead characters in the first season.

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