Posted in: Audio Dramas, TV | Tagged: adi tantimedh, American Horror Story, Audio Drama, lily rabe, podcast, presumed innocent, sanctuary, Voyage Media

Sanctuary: How I Wrote Lily Rabe's #1 Sci-Fi Audio Drama Podcast

Here's how I wrote Sanctuary, a new Science Fiction podcast starring Lily Rabe about the last woman to awake from cryosleep on a future Mars.

You probably haven't heard, but the prolific Lily Rabe (from multiple seasons of American Horror Story and most recently on Presumed Innocent) stars in a new Science Fiction audio drama podcast series called Sanctuary, now out on Apple podcasts and all the platforms. The podcast series hit #1 on Apple's charts on Tuesday. This the story of how the series was developed and how I came to write it.

Sanctuary is an 8-episode audio drama podcast series about the last woman to wake up from cryosleep on a terraformed Mars who discovers her husband has become a dictator, and she has to fight him to save not just herself but what's left of humanity.

Sanctuary: The Development Process of a Podcast

I had worked with Voyage Media Productions before on screenplay and TV pilot projects, and they knew about my experience writing audio drama for the BBC when I was a teenager, so producer Robert Mitas contacted me about developing a season of audio dramas called Sanctuary based on a concept by Levar Kelly and a feature screenplay from a previous writer. That's how development began. Robert told me that the story was about a woman who wakes up from a coma on Mars to find her husband had become a kind of leader there, and she ends up in conflict with him to survive.

For the new audio drama series Sanctuary, Robert pitched to me an evil AI as part of the story, and I was into it. We decided to add as many Science Fiction ideas to make it as interesting as possible: an AI that was more complex than just evil, but still insidious and whose real agenda might not be clear. We went with the heroine's arc being her finding a surrogate daughter in the form of a teenage killer who grew up on Mars and who's been assigned to be her bodyguard. Just for fun, we threw in a Chinese pirate queen inspired by the real-life Chinese pirate queen Ching Shi. We drew on influences like Kim Stanley Robinson's classic Mars Trilogy of novels that were about the attempts to form a civil society on a future terraformed Mars. That gave us an opportunity for more social commentary but updated to now with anxieties about class warfare, the aftermath of tech tycoon influence, and so on.

A feature-length screenplay these days runs about 90 pages or more to last at least 90 minutes for a movie. I began discussions with podcast producer Dan Benamor and director Matt Altman about the podcast series. It was determined that the series would run for eight episodes in keeping with the current TV streaming season format, and each episode would be around half an hour long, so around 24 pages of script. That would amount to a bingeable audio drama of under four hours to whizz through a heady rollercoaster ride of Science Fiction fun.

Sanctuary is streaming on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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