Modem Prometheus, an anthology show about urban folktales, is equal parts whimsy and fairy-tale danger. The first season drops you into a fantastical city filled with familiar folk stories. You’ll follow a character for around half an hour, hearing about their deepest desires and silliest follies as they crash headfirst into the phantasmagoria. Each episode calls back to another you’ve heard before, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for eager little listeners. It makes the world feel fleshed out like an ongoing improv bit with a friend as everything seems to be happening all at once in a different part of the city.

It’s one of the truest realizations of the “anthology horror turned overarching plot” we’ve seen a lot of recently- enticing bites of story whereafter you realize that the burger has sprouted eyes and is quietly observing you back, l'appel du vide-style.

Writer Neil Murton drip feeds you the rules of this world, leaving you hungry to learn more about the Wild Hunt hounding Deliveroo riders, the Night Bus you’ll only get to ride once, and the gods hiding trinkets in dirty river waters. And speaking of friends, the playful relationship you’ll develop with the narrator of these tales is a juicy cherry on top of this spooky sundae. Kate Angier plays the delectable voice that’s reminiscent of a cheeky fae creature, pulling off a variety of voices giving solid personalities to each new addition to the cast of characters. The sound is lushly designed with NAMTAO’s (Tris Oaten) synth-y techno beating like the blood flow of the city- traffic always on the move.

Don’t you want to come inside the candy house?

Jeffrey Cranor & Joseph Fink’s 2022 collaboration with Audible, Unlicensed, should have been a massive hit. And while it was plenty well-reviewed, both on the platform and by critics, it wasn’t. The hard-boiled detective story saw the fiction podcast superstar creators of Welcome to Night Vale trading their otherworldly desert town for another, altogether different one: Los Angeles. And while they may have ditched the sometimes supernatural, sometimes mundane trappings of their landmark series, they lost none of their trademark wit.

Unlicensed follows the shaky partnership between Molly Hatch (Molly Quinn), a recently divorced, two-year sober woman who’s lost all direction in life, and Lou Rosen (Lusia Strus), a questionably credentialed private detective who is equally brilliant as she is disorganized. Each episode shifts back and forth between their idiosyncratic narration styles as they take on cases too marginal to be pursued by licensed PI’s, let alone the police. That is, until they meet a teenage girl who swears, with no doubt in her mind, that her brother has been replaced by someone else entirely, and no one around them seems to care.

It’s a gripping tale that takes full advantage of its audio-only medium, as well as the team’s heightened budget. There are cameos from the Night Vale Presents stable, of course, like Cecil Baldwin, Mara Wilson, and Jasika Nicole, but they’re supplemented by higher profile guest stars like Jason Segel, Janet Varney, and Phoebe Judge. With sound design and an original score by Disparition, this show really did have everything going for it. It uses a masterful blend of episodic cases and an overarching plot that led to much more serialized storytelling, and left fans on a cliffhanger that, as of yet, has no resolution in sight.

The problem here isn’t with the series itself, or the people who have created it, but with the premium platform it continues to live on. As much as I want to see creators in this industry be able to make a decent living, and as happy as I am that Audible continues to invest the funds necessary for people to do so, it’s still pretty rare that exclusive series on the platform extend beyond a first season. And sometimes when they do, as with the case of Travis Beacham’s Impact Winter, they cease being exclusives at all.

This is purely anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt, but from my experience, even the most consistent Audible users are still primarily using the service to listen to audiobooks over podcasts. No matter how many times I try to suggest series like Unlicensed, or The Boar’s Nest, or Shenee Howard’s Koreaboo, my friends and family who use Audible are far more likely to be tearing through Stephen King’s back catalog, or marathoning Brandon Sanderson’s gargantuan high fantasy novels at double speed.

At this exact moment in time, there are just shy of 300 reviews of Unlicensed on Audible from its original inception. Many of those reviews are begging for a second season, and yet, no such continuation of the series has been announced. On the contrary, the team has continued to double down on their landmark series, which is about to celebrate its 13th anniversary, cross the extremely rare (in fiction) 250 episode threshold, and recently completed a nationwide tour.

What does it tell you when a series created by arguably the most well known people in this nascent medium of ours, still struggles to gain a foothold among even their own most diehard fans? I genuinely wish things weren’t this way. I wish that we could better prioritize compensating the people who create the art that we all obsess over, without having to shove their work behind a paywall that the average listener either can’t afford, or won’t pay on the basic principle of supporting a business owned by Amazon (which, is in and of itself, another article entirely). But in the meantime, this is the world we live in, and work this impactful by people this talented is still falling by the wayside.

I am genuinely glad that Unlicensed exists. Not only because the work is beautiful, although it absolutely is, but because it means for a little while Cranor, Fink, and the rest of their team were able to leverage tangible monetary resources from the work they’ve been making for us for this long. Unfortunately though, until Audible is willing to reconsider their permanent exclusivity windows, there is no world in which the Originals they create can capture the kind of rabid internet fandom enjoyed by shows like Welcome to Night Vale, or Wolf 359, or The Magnus Archives. And that is a damn shame.