Hey everyone. My name is Tina, I’m one of the producers here on Waiting for October, and I wanted to talk to you today about another show that we have been listening to and we love, and we wanted to share it with you. This one’s kind of interesting, because– I know that, like what we do in the audio drama community is –we share each other’s shows. Uh, “Every audio drama is like a gateway drug,” right? You listen to one and then you track your favorite voice actors down, or you hear an ad and you go listen to it. But I am so bad about– I will not listen to a show if I don’t know what it’s about. And sometimes, even if I do, my brain goes “Nope. Not today!”
But for whatever reason, I decided to “yolo” this one, like– The show is called, Give Me Away, right? And I’d heard people talk about it, I knew people who had listened to it, had worked on the show. And I’m still like, “That’s nice, and that exists.” But eventually [pause] it became a little bit of –the show is written by Mac Rogers, right? And I had listened to The Message. I had listened to Life After. (We don’t need to talk about how long ago that was, because I didn’t realize it until I started recording this. And boy, does that make me a little sad.) But, um, anyway, like there was that faith in the creator, so I was like, “Hmm, okay, let’s try it. I’m still not real clear about what this is about, but we’re gonna try it.” And I did, and it was [an] immediate like, “Oh, good. It’s a married couple fighting, my favorite genre ever,” [pauses in divorcee] but I stuck with it, and I’m so glad that I did, because they’re fighting and it gets awkward, and it is immediately apparent that there is a Big Event that happens, something happened to do with aliens. And you’re like, “Wait what? I thought we were just having a domestic dispute?? And like, the Give Me Away part– that makes sense!!” [because marriage context] And no, no, it turns out that’s not what the show is about at all.
We have this spaceship and it crashes, and you learn pretty quickly that it is full of these extraterrestrial political prisoners. And you also find out really quickly that there’s no way to extract them. Like they have been put into this prison in such a way that they are stuck. Somebody knew what they were doing. However, somebody really smart figures out, “But wait, we could help them out. We would just have to, you know, share our bodies with them, like sort of a co pilot situation!” Which — what?! Like, who, in their right mind, is going to volunteer for that?
And immediately, our main character, one half of the argumentative, you know, formerly married couple that we heard at the beginning, is like, “Yes, this is for me. I’m going to do that.” And his family has very big opinions on it, which are apparent very, very quickly. I have, like, a nice little summary that I could read you, but I don’t want to spoil anything. So what I will say is, the show essentially goes, “Okay, we’re going to do body snatchers, but consensually,” which is wild, but it lets them play with so many other concepts. There’s consent and just consensus, immigration and gender, unconventional family, but it’s still being presented like a sci fi thriller, and it’s just- it’s nuts, because it has all of the, like, body fascination stuff that Venom has, but it’s really funny. And it’s a comedy show, and you’re like, why am I laughing? This is kind of dark!
Um, it’s just so good, and it’s not terribly long either. The first season is nine episodes long, and it’s a complete story in itself, but there is room for it to grow. And you have the main character, Graham Shapiro. For me, at least I liked him, but it gives you so many viewpoints and explores the lives of so many other people that realistically, you’re probably gonna latch onto one of them. There is somebody for you. And I could talk for a long time about this show, but I am just going to quit and let you listen to it. If you enjoy the show, you can find credits and transcripts and much more info at Gideon media.com the website is gideon-media.com , and you know, as always, if you listen to any of those we share with you and you want to talk about it, just find me on social media, send me a message, and I am more than happy to talk about all these shows with you. But for now, please enjoy this episode of Give Me Away.
