Calls Me, Maybe?

What if a podcast could be a television show? If you're familiar with the big hit podcasts, you might think I'm talking about Song Exploder, or Limetown, or Lore -- each of which has been turned into a streaming TV series of varying success. But no, I'm talking about an original TV series conceived with essentially the same sensibilities as a podcast: Calls.

If you haven't heard of Calls, I'm not surprised. It runs on Apple TV+, which many don't have, and many more pick up only to binge a new season of Ted Lasso in a month before cancelling. Calls is a 9-episode series, each episode running a brisk 13 to 20 minutes. It unfolds as a series of "recovered" calls -- between friends, to 911, radio communications, and so forth. A science-fiction-tinged tale unfolds about some unexplainable event, a sort of Twilight Zone installment.

And without visuals... in, at least, the conventional sense.

There is something on screen when you watch Calls, but predominately, it's just the transcript of the dialogue being spoken, like when a newscast plays back a phone call and also shows what's being said. Behind the dialogue, a kaleidoscopic pattern provides a subtle emotional echo of the scene -- showing sound waves, suggesting topographic landscapes, depicting the thin thread connecting the speakers, and more.

The visuals are not "nothing," but essentially, Calls could be a podcast. You could listen to it rather than watch it. And its tone of "freaky, unexplained weirdness" would probably put it second only to "true crime" podcasts as a successful and widely listened-to podcast at that. At first, I wondered if this was a bit of pandemic-inspired creativity. This show premiered in March of 2021, and was doubtlessly made in the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic. The sound isn't meant to come across crystal clear, so while it could be recorded clean and processed, you also could just get it by literally getting an actor on the phone and recording the call. That said, Calls is actually based on a pre-existing French TV show of the same name, dating back to 2018 -- so perhaps the inspiration was pitching an adaptation of that material in a COVID environment.

There sure is a wide-ranging cast of actors in Calls. Different episodes of the show feature Clancy Brown, Rosario Dawson, Mark Duplass, Karen Gillan, Judy Greer, Nick Jonas, Jaeden Martell, Pedro Pascal, Aubrey Plaza, Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jennifer Tilly, and many, many more. They were no doubt enticed by the ease of making this, of the appeal in doing a one-off episode of eerie fun. (Though -- small spoiler -- the episodes turn out not to be as self-contained as they seem at first.)

Calls is by no means a reason to get Apple TV+ if you don't have it already. It's fascinating in being so different from anything else on TV, but it's not "can't miss" entertainment. Still, I would give it a B+. I appreciated the wild swing here at something different.