I sometimes abuse ampersands

Okay, coming clean: I might have contracted a het OTP for a podcast that does not have a fandom. I need handholding, or chicken broth, or whatever it is that one does with OTPs not reciprocated by the fandom community at large.

The Black Tapes is an illicit love child of The Serial and Welcome to Night Vale, taking the format (investigative journalism in radio format) from the former, and the genre (weird wobbly horror) from the latter, with a generous sprinkling of The X-Files on top. It has a Schroedinger fandom (you know, not alive, but also not quite dead, unless you look closely.)

The premise of the podcast in a nutshell: Alex Reagan, a radio host and a nerd extraordinaire, wants to create a podcast about people with weird jobs, but her first interviewee is such a goldmine that she basically creates a podcast about him. Enter Richard Strand, an eccentric millionaire who founded an institute for disproving sightings of anything beyond the scope of physics (ranging from reported poltergeists and cases of demonic possession to the Slenderman and other urban folklore favourites). He promises a million dollars to whoever proffers a case that cannot be disproved; the viable claimants-the cases that, he says, cannot be disproved because of various technicalities-are the Black Tapes from the title, which Alex Reagan starts to investigate in-depth. The podcast starts out with the episodic monster-of-the-week format, but acquires a mytharc later on, right as Richard Strand acquires a mysterious past of the missing wife variety, and Alex Reagan acquires a possible demonic curse hanging over her head. (I hope I didn’t get anything horribly wrong: I listen to podcasts when falling asleep, so, hardly conducive to longterm memory.)

Of course, I basically sat up straight from moment one and went, but what if Richard Strand is a depressed flesh-eating demon, paying people to prove his nonexistence as a rhetorical suicide? Alex would laugh so hard when she finds out just what the team sceptic is. And he would be all injured innocence, like, but all those other cases were false, he knows because he’s the real thing! Ugh, note to self: never ever consume any media that does not have a fandom, especially if it's conducive to your well-documented thing for pairings where a half of the pairing is a monster (I blame early exposure to The Interview with the Vampire) (I also take recs).

Anyway, here's the theme song for The Black Tapes. Its first lines - Oh my lord, here’s a just reward: bring me my devil (which is kind of all you can hear in the intro to the podcast anyway) - make my heart skip a beat or two.