In mid-March, Mariana Marroquin logged on to a video call so that producers of a new reality series could take her through a rough edit of a sensitive scene, detailing Marroquin’s recent visit to her native Guatemala. As it played, Marroquin began to cry.
“I cried a lot,” she recalled during a video call a few weeks later. “Because I was happy. I was so happy.”
Why? “It was about listening to my own voice,” she said. “That’s still surreal to me that I can communicate who I am.”
Marroquin’s voice is essential, as the show featuring her, “Being Trans,” which will release the first of six episodes on April 28, is a podcast. The debut of Being Studios, a new Lemonada Media initiative, “Being Trans,” follows four transgender cast members as they go about their regular lives in and around Los Angeles. Which means while at least one scene is about renewing a Costco membership, others are debating hormone therapy. “Being Trans” and a planned second season—formed around retirees and tentatively titled “Being Golden”—try to translate the immediacy and apparent truth of reality television into an audio-only format.
Stephanie Wittels Wachs, co-founder of Lemonada (“Last Day”, “No One Is Coming to Save Us”), called the Being project “a grand experiment.” Before shooting started, she wasn’t quite sure what that experiment would yield. Could the reality format really make the leap into a new medium? Could it make that leap humanely? To put it another way, if a glass of chardonnay is thrown and no one is there to see it, does it make a splash?
Many podcasts rely on a documentary format, even more are improvised and unscripted. But Being Studios, which plans to release two limited series a year, is aiming for something different. Mostly shot in the field and without presenters and outside narration, the shows hope to immerse audiences in the lives of the subjects.
“Our whole purpose of Being is radical empathy,” said Wittels Wachs. “You just hear that people exist.”
In terms of podcasting, Lemonada tries something unconventional with “Being Trans” and does it with adequate resources. When the show arrives, it will join an already busy landscape, filled with established and anticipated formats.
Podcasting is no longer the fringe medium it was 10 years ago. Nearly 80 percent of Americans are now familiar with podcasts, more than half listen regularly. According to the Podcast Index, more than 600,000 podcast episodes have been posted in the past 90 days.
About being transgender in America
“We’ve moved from what was more of a niche market to a mass market,” Courtney Holt, then Global Head of Podcasts and New Initiatives at Spotify, said in a November conversation. (Holt announced his departure from Spotify in mid-April.)
Even so, Holt still believed there was room for innovation, citing the proliferation of video podcasts and Spotify’s adoption of interactive tools like polls. Rachel Ghiazza, the head of US Content at Audible, pointed to recent projects at her company that have expanded what an audiobook can be, including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” comics and Jesse Eisenberg’s “When You Finish Saving the World.” She also mentioned an upcoming show, “Breakthrough,” Audible’s first venture into the competition format.
“It’s a very exciting time,” she said. “Technology is getting better and better. The way we can listen is getting deeper and deeper. That really opens the doors to other ways to think about and use audio.”
In August, before shooting began, Kasey Barrett, the executive producer of Being Studios and a veteran of shows like “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and “Born This Way,” had many questions about how “Being Trans” would meet this moment. .
“I keep wrapping my head around the fact that we don’t have any visual signposts,” she said. “Creatively, how are we going to orient listeners to where they are and who they’re listening to and what’s going to happen?”
Two months later, when the shooting was underway, she started to find some answers. “Being Trans” had appealed to people with what Barrett called big lives and a willingness to share them, before landing on three main cast members: Sy-Clarke Chan, a legal assistant who identifies as trans-nonbinary; Chloe Corcoran, alumni relations specialist and trans woman; and Jeffrey Jay, a stand-up comedian and trans man. Marroquin, a program manager at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and a trans woman, was meant to be an elder, a figure the other cast members could confer with. She also quickly became part of the main cast. That the mics couldn’t capture her high feminine style—heeled boots, vibrant eyeshadow—was an occasional source of regret.
Still, there were advantages to just audio. Each episode would cost about $100,000, double the amount of a typical Lemonada show, but somewhere between a quarter and an eighth of a typical reality hour. And the format provided more flexibility. “We’re not dealing with continuity issues,” Barrett said. “We’re not dealing with light or makeup. And we can do things on a much smaller scale, which improves intimacy.”
On a sunlit morning in Burbank, California, about a week before Halloween last year, the crew gathered outside Jay’s blue stucco apartment building. With just a little nudge from the producers, Jay greeted a friend, Mackenzie Rohan, and as a fuzzy booming microphone approached, he suggested we take a walk in nearby Johnny Carson Park.
In the park, Jay and Rohan sat at a picnic table, microphones in their pockets, with the producers standing nearby, their faces turned away to ensure the conversation went off screen. The friends discussed a few story points that producers had highlighted: how Jay was recently asked to mentor a transgender kid, his relationship with his girlfriend, a trainee pilot. When the chat faltered, Sele Leota, the accompanying producer, respectfully forwarded it with questions about engagements and weddings and gender binaries.
Jay seemed reconciled, even receptive, to these minor breaches. “It’s weird hanging out with a bunch of people who ask you how your life is and a… [expletive]’ he said, speaking fondly of the crew of six, the majority of whom identify as queer.
But he still joked about the size. At a comedy show later that day, he accidentally spilled a few gulps of bottled water on himself. “This is a podcast!” he reassured the crowd.
The next day, Clarke-Chan and their husband hosted a birthday party for their 4-year-old son. The producers were also present for this to record the ambient noise of screaming toddlers. Clarke-Chan described the recording process as “very new, scary strange.”
“Every now and then I’ll say something and then I’ll lie in bed that night thinking, ‘Oh god, our pediatrician might hear that,'” Clarke-Chan said.
This spring, in a series of story meetings, the producers decided exactly what listeners — pediatricians, others — would hear. They had recorded 50 hours of tape over 12 weeks, for about 600 hours in total, which they then had to cut into just six 45-minute episodes. The producers tried to fuse some trans-specific storylines — like one about a character contemplating top surgery — with more universal ones about relationships and parenting and careers, to better capture whole lives without resorting to sensationalism.
“I don’t want anyone at the end to feel like, ‘What did I just do? What was that for?” said Barrett.
In March, the producers played rough trims for focus groups, who reported that with no presenter or traditional scene, they were sometimes confused about who was speaking and when and where. So some extra dialogue was included. “Next On” and “Previous On” segments were also added.
“It’s a brand new genre,” Barrett said. “It’s all learning.”
The cast members were also learning. Answering the producers – and each other – had caused a lot of self-reflection. “Oh my gosh, we’ve discovered so much about ourselves,” Marroquin said.
In the beginning, Clarke-Chan had joined the podcast out of curiosity and pleasure. Now the participation felt more meaningful. “I’ve become aware every day how little people know about transgender people outside of that time-framed water cooler conversation.”
This podcast, they thought, could do something else. It could show that trans lives are much like any other life in most ways, that trans people also renew Costco memberships. And it could accomplish this by letting its cast members speak for themselves, with little mediation.
“It’s a cliché to be, I just want people to see us as normal,” Clarke-Chan said. “I also want us to be more than usual or cooler than usual sometimes. We don’t have to be boring. But I just want us to show ourselves as ourselves.”