Commentary for Season 1, Episode 1

June 15, 2024·57 min·4 clips

Chris Burnside shares the creepy tweet that sparked Uncanny Valley: humans once had to fear things pretending to be human.

1. Uncanny Valley lead writer Chris Burnside hosts the first commentary episode for the show, joined by the full writing team, two lead performers, and composer/sound designer Catherine K.G. Seaton. 2. The group includes co-writers Megan Burnside and Lucy Waskowitz, performers Luna Madison (Audrey) and Emily Kallenberg (Izzy), and Katie Seaton as both composer and sound designer. 3. The episode's core purpose is to walk through the creative and production decisions that shaped Uncanny Valley's first season, with full spoilers for the season. 4. Chris traces the show's concept to a tweet reframing uncanny valley as an evolutionary claim: 'at some point, humans had to learn how to fear things that pretended to be human.' 5. He arrived at the first writing meeting with only four placeholder character names — protagonist, dead best friend, stalker, and pilot — and a general seasonal outline. 6. Lucy Waskowitz was recruited to the writing team by Chris while she was a sophomore student in his writing class; her initial excitement was partly because the Polar Express is her favorite film for being 'so almost like people, but it's not.' 7. The Dayton Writers Movement production company was founded in 2016 with a show called Unwritten, and switched to audio drama because the group lacked the budget for a full web series. 8. Alaska was chosen as the setting because its remote regions are genuinely difficult to enter or leave, making it function as 'frontier life in today's time.' 9. Katie designed the soundscape around layered motion — wind, tree detail, and the thin wooden walls of Audrey's cabin — to convey that something is present but unseen. 10. The creature music draws from dark Scandinavian folk tradition Chris sent as a playlist: sparse, one-chord-for-minutes material that gave Katie a dimension separate from her natural instinct toward melody and complex texture. 11. Luna Madison describes Audrey as 'the easiest character she's ever had' to find, noting her awkwardness comes from a deep need to connect rather than from anxiety — a contrast with Elaine, her character in Dayton's earlier show Unwritten. 12. Emily Kallenberg describes Izzy as a perpetually young character who experiences things alongside Audrey despite being unable to physically intervene, which creates a sense of helplessness paired with loyalty. 13. Izzy's binaural panning was updated in the first five episodes of the series — after initial release — to make her float around rather than remain fixed five degrees to Audrey's right, which Katie felt better reflected Izzy's capricious energy. 14. Chris explains that the dead best friend character was originally a structural necessity: without narration, a character can't be alone in a scene, so Izzy exists as a constant presence who also reveals Audrey's inner life through their interaction. 15. Chris's core thesis on Audrey is that her fearfulness and anxiety are learned responses shaped by a character named Cody — she was not naturally jittery, and flashback scenes are intended to show who she was before. 16. The cold open featuring Tom and Sandy was a deliberate departure from The Hidden People's slow burn, which required 11 episodes to reach its genre-defining twist — Chris wanted the creature, horror, and isolation in the very first scene. 17. The cold open's realistic argument between Tom and Sandy — described by one cast member as sounding like 'recording my parents' argument' — was intended to make the horror that follows land harder. 18. The creature's voice was performed by actor Steven Kallenberg with original clicks between lines, then processed by Katie using EQ to cut warm frequencies and D-reverb pushed well past its corrective range to sound 'stripped away from its environment.' 19. Listeners who enjoy behind-the-scenes audio drama production discussions covering writing philosophy, character craft, and sound design will find this episode rewarding. 20. Listeners who have not finished Uncanny Valley season one are explicitly warned the episode contains full spoilers and should finish the series first.

As heard by us

A clear behind-the-scenes discussion of Audrey, Izzy, and the no-narration choice that shaped Uncanny Valley.

Uncanny Valley's first commentary episode is a clear look at how the show came together. Chris Burnside, the lead writer, sits down with Megan Burnside, Luna Madison, Emily Kallenberg, Catherine K.G.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how a dead best friend keeps Audrey from going silent.

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