Dick Wolf produced a podcast, and it's already becoming a TV show

It doesn’t happen as often anymore now that established comic books are a hot commodity, but one not-so-secret old trick to getting a screenplay in front of Hollywood executives was to turn it into a concept for a comic book and then try to sell people on the idea of an adaptation of that comic book—regardless of whether or not the comic book ever actually got made. That’s what happened with Tom Cruise’s Oblivion, and we all surely have fond memories of that movie existing.

Potentially fake comic books are done, though. The new money’s in potentially fake podcasts, or at least podcasts that seem like they’re explicitly designed to be transformed into other things. It’s hard not to see that as the case with Dark Woods, a scripted mystery podcast that just released its first episode last week and is already getting a TV series adaptation from Universal Television (according to Deadline).

The reason this is all happening so fast is that Dark Woods happens to be produced by Wolf Entertainment, the production company of none other than Dick Wolf—one of the most prolific TV creators and producers in the whole TV business. In other words, they put the name of a TV guy on a podcast and then immediately decided to turn that podcast into a TV show. It’s brilliant, if a little dismissive of podcasts as a medium.

The podcast version of Dark Woods stars Corey Stoll, Monica Raymund, and Reid Scott, and Deadline says it’s about the “suspicious death of a young park volunteer in the California Redwood Forest.” There’s also “two estranged ex-spouses, a stubborn game warden, and a charismatic councilwoman.” No word on how any of these people feel about ads for meal-delivery kits, Better Help, or any of the other things podcasts have ads for these days.