CBC’s “The Shadows” Will Teach You What a Love Story Really Is
From 2015 to 2017 (and with roots in a previous project, Audio Smut, from 2014), Kaitlin Prest’s nonfiction podcast The Heart was a landmark in intimate storytelling in podcasting. The Heart was, on the surface, a podcast about sex and love, but it wove those concepts into themes of autonomy, identity, memory, comfort, and deep criticisms on societal norms. The podcast was groundbreakingly earnest, honest, direct, and at times, graphic–all of which earned the podcast plenty of award buzz, including a Peabody nomination.
The Heart concluded in 2017 with discussion of a new project following. Those who signed up for The Heart‘s newsletter slowly received cryptic, short emails containing links addressed to someone named Devon. When clicked, the links would open to images which then sometimes led to short audio clips. The newsletter was a slow, mysterious announcement for Prest’s new project: The Shadows, a fiction mini-series, which was released in full on September 24th, 2018.
The Shadows follows a fictionalized version of Kaitlin Prest and the manifestations of her love across several years. For the purposes of this review, I’ll be referring to Kaitlin Prest, the fictional character, as “Kaitlin.” I’ll be referring to Kaitlin Prest, the real person and creator of The Shadows, “Prest.”
Spoken out loud, Kaitlin Prest’s name is also a complete sentence: Kaitlin pressed. It’s an accurate statement. In the intimacy of her work, The Shadows or otherwise, Prest has a focus on bodies pressed up together as well as pressing the listener to think outside of what feels comfortable. The Shadows, like its predecessors, is an intimate story about love and sex, but it focuses on two primary subjects of inquiry: romantic love and monogamy.
Narratively speaking, The Shadows follows Kaitlin, a puppeteer aspiring to make something great of her life, her work, and her love. Kaitlin craves the exciting, passionate, storybook romances everyone is raised on. She wants to feel her heart wrapped up in someone else’s, and when one of her relationship fails, she sparks a friendship with a fellow puppeteer, Charlie. While Kaitlin is energetic, impulsive, and romantic with both a capital and lower-case R, Charlie is logical, reserved, and introverted. It isn’t long before the two wind up in a romance–and it isn’t long after that Kaitlin finds her hopes of a great love not quite what she expected.
Summaries, of course, do The Shadows no justice; while this podcast plays with tropes, making a factual discussion of the plot seem played out, it’s deeply subversive. Kaitlin is an impulsive extrovert, but she isn’t a manic pixie dream girl–even if, at times, both she and Charlie seem to wish she could be–because she’s a multifaceted human being. Charlie, likewise, isn’t a man made better by his zany girlfriend, nor is he a frustrating antagonist that only serves as a something for Kaitlin to overcome. He, too, is multifaceted and complex. The Shadows doesn’t exist to play into tropes: it exists to force the listener to reconcile the tropes they’ve been fed with the reality of how actual people think, behave, and exist.
The show’s alternating narration adds to this deep, rich, honest characterization, too. In a video trailer for The Shadows, Kaitlin asks, “How do we know what’s real? Does it matter?” The fallibility of an objective truth is another prominent theme in The Shadows, explored largely through the alternating narration between Kaitlin and Charlie. Several scenes throughout The Shadows are presented from both perspectives, focusing on the differences in how the two perceive an event or a conversation.
This isn’t to say that The Shadows is only rooted in reality, though. While realism is embedded in every facet of the show between pulling from Prest’s life to keeping all of the in-scene dialogue improvised, there’s a whimsical, dreamlike quality to the work as a whole. In the initial episodes, there’s a feeling of being untethered by time in these characters’ lives. One especially memorable episode is told not through the perspective of Kaitlin or Charlie, but through the perspective of a sweater that is very important to Kaitlin. While this departure in narration only lasts one episode, it feels entirely at home in the dreamlike, almost surreal quality of the show’s early episodes. It hearkens back to episodes of Everything Is Alive with a more personal, critical edge.
As the episodes progress, it’s easy to see that things in this romance will not be as easy as both Kaitlin and Charlie want or expect them to be. At times, The Shadows is a painful, almost excruciating listen. Regardless of your relationship status, your previous experiences with love, your feelings towards monogamy, everything somehow still feels a little too close to home. Something iconically Prest is the ability to make the explicit sex the least uncomfortable thing in a story; it’s difficult to feel squeamish about two bodies when you’re concerned about your own ideas about what love is.
The Shadows is a great love story, in that it is vast, almost feeling like a literal epic at times, and it is about so many facets of what love is. It is not a love story for those looking for a simple, sweet, storybook romance–or maybe, it’s exactly for those people, just not in the way they expect. It’s a love story that will make you question what a love story is, why we tell love stories the way we do, and how we owe it to ourselves to tell them to ourselves.
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