When the likes of Jordan Peele or Julianne Moore get in on the game, you know fiction podcasts are having a moment. Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions was behind the blockbuster Quiet Part Loud, a 12-episode drama that topped charts when it debuted, in late 2022, and Moore joined Oscar Isaac to play doctor to his patient and a whole lot more in the staggeringly successful and also brilliant Case 63.
The BBC, however, has been in this game for quite some time, thank you ma’am. The Archers, which remains one of the most popular serials of its type, has been filling us in on the antics of the people of Ambridge since 1951; it has transferred neatly to the digital age to bring in a whole new generation of listeners. Now we have BBC Sounds’ People Who Knew Me, a taut tale of loss and deception lit by a cracking performance by Rosamund Pike as the pod’s protagonist, the Los Angeles-based single mother Connie Prynne.
The 10-episode audio drama is an adaptation from a book by Kim Hooper, expertly translated to the format by the writer and director Daniella Isaacs. Prynne opens by addressing her former self: Emily Morris, the woman she erased on 9/11, passing off hers as another of the thousands of Twin Towers deaths, and beginning a new life in Los Angeles under a new name. The story, about why she left, about who she left and about who really died in the World Trade Center that day, unravels in flashbacks, voicemails and her own recollections as she grapples with news that throws all of her decisions into relief.
Add Hugh Laurie, unfailingly charismatic even in this somewhat disembodied form, who plays her present day will-they-won’t-they friend, and you’ve got a cracking drama spanning multiple timelines and with multiple plotlines that intersect around themes of love and forgiveness and family.
There’s something visceral to locating at least part of this invented drama in a real-life moment, specifically at the Twin Towers – the audio, even if fictionalised for the purposes of these imagined characters, sounds all too familiar to anyone around in 2001 who witnessed the hours after two planes struck the towers. It feels real, and though these people we hear about may not be, their emotional landscape becomes eerily recognisable terrain.
Crucially too for a podcast that navigates between timelines and with more than one romantic arc, People Who Knew Me is expertly edited, smoothly produced, steamy in all the right places and affectingly poignant. There is much here about what makes a marriage and marks it, how hard it is to ever truly know another person, and how a life can turn on the toss of a coin, quite literally in this case.
Pike does some heavy lifting to get us get on board with her character’s moral ambiguity, humanising this woman who makes a series of choices, some truly questionable, that set her on a course increasingly difficult to alter. A lot is packed into these 10 quarter-hour episodes spent largely inside Prynne’s head, keeping us invested to the end. If you’re someone who has never made a questionable decision and then had to live with its consequences, as those consequences split and spiderweb out like a crack in a windscreen, then good for you. Honestly, I think you’ll still enjoy this story.
