Have you ever talked to Siri/Alexa? Well, Gimlet Media’s new scripted podcast is here to make you think twice before ever doing it again.
Meet Sandra, “the world’s most responsive and intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator”, a virtual assistant very much like Siri/Alexa (voiced by the brilliant Kristen Wiig). Sandra can help you identify allergies, tell you the temperature of any country you like and even make your appointments for you. But what makes Sandra unlike Siri/Alexa is the fact that she’s powered by hundreds of humans answering queries in a call centre-like situation, instead of being powered by actual artificial intelligence, all unbeknownst to her users, of course.
Enter Helen Pererra (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat), desperate to leave her small town and small town husband behind, and pins her hopes at a new beginning when she joins Orbital Teledynamics, a shadowy corporation that runs Sandra. After an unusual interview with her oddball boss Dustin (Ethan Hawke), Helen is quickly assigned to the birds department, where she’ll answer any queries about birds — only that she’ll be speaking as Sandra, her human voice distorted into a robotic one as it reaches the unassuming user.
Sandra takes liberal thematic and plot cues from the likes of Spike Jonze’s Her, James Ponsoldt’s The Circle (based on Dave Eggers’ novel of the same name), and even Charlie Brooker’s widely popular series Black Mirror, and it works best when it explores its premise with a light hand, especially when it comes to the protagonist.
Although the central conceit of the series is Sandra and the technology (or lack thereof) that powers her, the story focuses primarily on Helen. Her transformation from naive and eager to please newcomer to a confident and zealous employee, who also has to juggle her imminent divorce and eccentric and demanding boss, makes for a riveting listen, thanks mostly to Shawkat’s flawless performance. The show also ponders on the state of surveillance and data security, which becomes especially urgent in the wake of Cambridge Analytica, as well as the slippery slope of increased human dependance on technology, especially the internet.
But in a bizarre turn of events, writers Kevin Moffett and Matthew Derby abandon a perfectly viable story trajectory at about episode six, to turn Sandra into something that resembles a B-grade thriller, complete with a smarmy villain and a revenge plot. It’s a jarring transformation, one that asks for an impossible leap of imagination, and by the end of which the only reliable character on the show is Helen’s deadbeat, jail-fleeing husband.
But for those who are looking to enjoy a new fiction podcast, Sandra makes for a novel and quick listen, not least because of its stellar cast. The cliffhanger ending also suggests season two will be coming our way soon enough. Also, in a trend that’s quickly becoming the norm, Sandra has been picked up by Paul Lee’s wiip to be developed for premium television.
Wiip (word.idea.imagination.production) creates and produces content for digital and global platforms. The company recently secured its first series order at Facebook Watch for Queen America, a dark comedy starring Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Gimlet Media, on the other hand, also has its high-profile fiction podcast series Homecoming being turned into a series, starring Julia Roberts and coming up at Amazon.
