Roundtable: What’d you think of Gimlet’s Sandra?
1. What’s your tweet-length review and grade of Sandra?
KEVIN: A colossal waste of Kristen Wiig’s talents. Overall a pretty boring Black Mirror knock-off. B-
BRENDAN: Excellent voice acting and audio environments in Sandra. I felt grounded and that it was a realistic world through the Gimlet lens. I enjoyed the plot as Siri, meets Her, meets TalkSpace. The disappointingly ambiguous ending makes me expect a second season. C
WIL: I wanted to love this, because I love more visibility for audio dramas. What I got was a shoddy narrative and shoddier design work. D+
2. What was your favorite part of the podcast?
KEVIN: Imagining real people are behind the smart voice assistants we use everyday was a fun thought experiment. Whoever are behind mine would likely just be bored crazy with me asking about weather updates ten times a day and snicker because i’m too lazy to turn my coffee maker on.
BRENDAN: The part where Helen talks with the little girl Teresa and convinces her Sandra is real was adorable.
WIL: Kristin Wiig and Alia Shawkat did their very, very best with the material. I was pretty delighted by how convincing the usually hammy, broad Wiig was as a Siri stand-in; her moments in some of the final scenes, where she was acting as Shawkat’s character but still maintaining the robotic monotone voice was pretty fun.
3. What was your least favorite part of Sandra?
KEVIN: I couldn’t shake off how inefficient and unrealistic a human-powered Alexa would actually be.
BRENDAN: So many ads or the fucking ending? Hard to pick.
WIL: The sound design here was so distracting, and it sounded so amateur. It seemed like the producers thought more sound effects mean more immersion, but they wound up being so distracting. I’m of the belief that good sound design work is like that moment with God from Futurama, you know? “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” You don’t want people to pay attention to your sound design, and I couldn’t stop paying attention to it here.
4. How would you improve the podcast?
KEVN: Maybe have a conclusion next time? It ended with 1-2 episodes worth of story to go.
BRENDAN: Charge the advertisers more so there are fewer ads (I mean, the ads are personalized enough to warrant a premium!) and write a satisfying conclusion (just saving the one lady we don’t know or care about isn’t a satisfying ending. The two should have met IRL somehow.)
WIL: I would have hired a writing crew and a production crew who actually knows what they’re doing in audio drama. The entire time I listened, I couldn’t help but think, “What if Mischa Stanton or Alexander Danner had done the design work?” or “What if Eric Silver or Eli McIlveen had written this?” If you want to make a well-written, well-produced audio drama, why aren’t you using people who actually make those things?
5. Who was the most compelling character?
KEVIN: Donny — albeit a caricature and simplified stereotype — was a nice point of levity.
BRENDAN: Alia Shawkat for sure. I was drawn in by her presence. (I assume Kristen Wiig was Sandra? That could have been anyone to me…)
WIL: The . . . bird? I’m sorry, y’all. I really did not like Sandra, and that opinion is not getting more favorable with time.
6. How do you feel the Sandra tech fit into today’s society?
KEVIN: It was semi prescient with the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica news, but overall fell flat. I imagine folks at Apple, Google, and Amazon laughed when they heard how their fictitious device worked in the backend.
BRENDAN: The tech felt perfect for a fictional alt-present day setting.
WIL: Oh, not at all, not even a little. The entire premise made me think about that episode of The Simpsons where Marge and Ned Flanders are manually Big Brother-ing all of Springfield. That episode came out almost ten years ago. It felt too on-the-nose quirky and there was no way I could buy into it.
7. What did you think of the ads?
KEVIN: Ads were well done and felt natural, there were just ~5x too many.
BRENDAN: Soooo many ads!! I listened to all the ads for the first 3 or so episodes. They were good! Mostly.
Actually, Rant: the Firefox ads were awful. They were negative ads! I kept thinking “oh I’m going to have my identity stolen or be tracked or all this bad stuff if I use Firefox. No thanks!” Tell me the benefits; don’t paint a doomsday scenario.
I did enjoy that they tied them all into the theme of personal assistant. That was a great touch. Keep me in the fictional world.
WIL: What baffles me the most about the ads is the spacing of them. The ad reads were a weird forced fit into the vibe of the show, but I was mostly annoyed by their rhythm. If you release an entire audio drama in one fell swoop, obviously to be binged, having ads bookend each episode and intrude in the middle destroys your plot’s momentum. How am I supposed to take the stakes seriously when the suspense is broken up with ads for Quips or whatever they were?
8. What do you think Gimlet paid Kristen Wiig?
KEVIN: NOT ENOUGH! How do you have the greatest character actress in the last 25 years, known for her emotions, wacky antics, and distinct personalities …. and deduce her to a robotic voice????
BRENDAN: Dunno. Don’t care. If that’s the reason there’s so many ads, they should have passed that cost onto the advertisers and not made the consumers pay for it.
WIL: Not enough.
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