A Full-cast Scripted Comedy About Life In A Small Town

My name is Chris Polo, and I’m the creator, writer and director of Muckey Landing, a full-cast scripted comedy. My background is in theater, first as an actor and director, and eventually as a writer. Our show is a full-cast scripted comedy about life in a small town in rural downstate Delaware called Muckey Landing, featuring well-known Delaware actor Mike Polo (who also happens to be my husband) as professional curmudgeon Virgil Slatter, proprietor of the Muckey Landing Market, Diner and Hardware Emporium, and Bruce Leister, another talented and very funny actor, as Virgil’s his best friend and business partner, the undeniably dimwitted Harmon Truesdale. We have a stable of twenty other actors, from 20-somethings to 80-plus-year-old seniors, who bring to life various other oddball residents of Muckey Landing. Regular characters include a pair of taciturn Amish farmers growing medical marijuana because there's more money in it, the apoplectic manager of the local radio station, a sexually uninhibited new age artist with a thing for both pornographic postcards and Harmon, and an amazingly rude customer service representative who seems to work for every business in town and gets the better of Virgil and Harmon every time they answer the phone or make a call. Virgil suffers through Harmon’s unfortunate propensity to blow up, burn down or otherwise destroy everything he touches, while Harmon wonders why he can never get a second date and Virgil marvels that he ever gets a first one.

When Sirius satellite radio came along, I became a huge fan of the old-time radio shows they carried, especially the comedies like The Jack Benny Show, Burns and Allen, and Fibber McGee and Molly. I like to think that Muckey Landing is what those shows would have been like if the actors had been allowed to drink, cuss and talk about sex on the air.

My first foray into writing comedy came about during the 2000s, when Mike, Bruce and I wrote, produced and directed a cabaret-style comedy fundraiser that poked fun at our home state for our local theater. Delaware Unleashed turned out to be hugely popular. The last year we produced it, audience members camped out in front of the theater the night before tickets went on sale to make sure they got seats. It was a large undertaking, very labor-intensive, and after eleven years, we hung it up. But the writing bug was still there.

A few years ago, I discovered podcasts. Like many others, the now-venerable Welcome to Nightvale was the first one I subscribed to, but I eventually found others that sounded like the modern successors to those old-time radio shows I’d loved for years. Wooden Overcoats was the first of those, and eventually I discovered Alba Salix, which really opened my eyes to the possibilities of podcasting. I’d been thinking for years that one of these days I was going to write a play, but podcasting got me thinking a new direction.

In 2017, I sat down and started writing scripts. The theme was Delaware and the voices I heard as I was writing were Mike’s and Bruce’s. Write what you know, right? I really wasn’t sure if these would ever actually be recorded. I hoped they would, but I really wasn’t sure how that was going to happen. Mike and Bruce would do a cold reading each time I finished a script, and eventually they started urging me to take it further: to actually hold auditions and record them. I held out, thinking I needed a full season of 30-minute scripts before I wanted to do that. Finally, in September 2019, with seven scripts that I estimated would add up to five and a half hours of recorded time, I finished my story arc for the first season of Muckey Landing and had no more excuses not to move ahead.

We set auditions for November, pulled together a cast, and scheduled recording sessions for January. I’m fortunate in that I’m married to a guy who spent several years of his misspent youth in radio and knew mostly what he was doing when it came to buying equipment, recording and editing. Our first recording session took place inside a pop-up tent frame lined with moving blankets that we set up in our family room, and from that, Mike produced a trailer that went live on February 2, 2020. The first full-length episode, “Virgil Gets A Dog,” was uploaded on March 14. We were able to record episode 2, “The Late, Late Harmon Truesdale” just before the entire state shut down because of the pandemic. We soldiered on, with me writing new, shorter 10- to 20-minute episodes mostly featuring just Mike and Bruce. We've done that for the last six months.

We all work full-time. I mostly write on weekends, and we also record on weekends. Mike usually takes a couple of weekends after a recording session to do the sound design and editing. We try to get an episode out each month, but haven’t always been successful. One thing we’ve noticed from our stats is that when listeners find us, they tend to binge-listen to all the episodes we’ve done so far, which sort of takes the pressure off. We’re not a topical show, we’re telling stories, so it’s not like the episode won’t make sense if we don’t get one out every week.

Funding has been entirely out of our own pockets. We’ve got somewhere between $500-$800 invested at this point for equipment and marketing (plus I put together a fine craft table, lol!).

So far, there’s no revenue and no sponsorships, just outgo. We’ve only got 2 full-length episodes out there, plus a trailer and seven mini-episodes that we’ve done during the pandemic. That’s given us 1,600 downloads, so it’s early days for us yet.

The benefits are that we’re doing something we love with people we enjoy working with. We love to create, and we love to entertain. I think every podcaster thinks, “What would happen if we hit it big?” The odds of that happening aren’t good, and that’s not why we’re doing it. Just having someone tells us they heard the show and liked it is a huge reward!

We use Reaper on a Macbook Pro for sound editing, Rode mics and a Behringer Umc 404hd Audiophile mixing board. Our podcast host is Podbean. We don’t do interviews, we use pre-written scripts. We schedule actors to come in to record at our home and send them their scripts ahead of time by email. On recording days, we set up individual sound booths made of PVC pipes with moving blankets for sound deadening, one for each actor, do a sound check and run-through with them, I give them notes on delivery and any changes I want them to make, and then we record.

We’ve added Muckey Landing to every podcast aggregator we know of. A third of our users find us on Apple, followed by Chrome, Spotify and Safari with 10% each, and 17 other clients after that. We advertise mostly on Facebook and Twitter and use both of those just to build awareness, but our biggest boost came when we were featured in one of the statewide daily newspapers shortly after we launched.

I’ve learned this is a long, slow process, and at times, it can be quite discouraging. Sometimes it seems like we’re not getting ahead, and I start to wonder whether it’s worth it. In those moments, I remember an interview I heard with Eli McIlveen and Sean Howard, creators of Alba Salix. Like us, they were involved in local theater and got together with some of their friends to create the show. After putting together their first season, it didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so they didn’t continue with it. Some time later – I think it may have been a couple of YEARS later! -- Sean checked the stats on the show and saw they were really moving. They hadn’t done anything with it at all since their first season – it took off on its own. They went back to work on it, and the rest is history. I find that very inspirational.

Website: muckeylanding.com
Press page: muckeylanding.com/press
Mail: mail@muckeylanding.com
Facebook.com/muckeylanding
Twitter.com/muckeylanding, @MuckeyLanding
News article: https://delawarestatenews.net/entertainment/muckey-landing-podcast-takes-aim-at-fictional-delaware-town/