Cinematic Storytelling with Crime Show's Emma Courtland

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Last year, Emma Courtland was nominated for a Best Host Award at the Ambies, the podcast academy's glitter-showered ode to the podcast industry. Its attempt to remake the Oscars. For Emma, that was a particularly appropriate award ceremony. Before moving into podcasts at Wondery and Spotify's Gimlet, the host of Crime Show spent seven years working at the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, home of the original red carpet. 

Emma didn't win last year. That award went to one of the biggest snips in podcasting, Sam Sanders. But just one listen to Emma's fascinating crime show and you instantly know why the Podcast Academy nominated her. Her delivery, which is intelligent, a bit distanced, but warm, and that elusive ability to write and voice an audio movie—that story we watch unfold in our heads. Along with her curiosity about how to ethically tell larger stories that happen to have a crime at their center. We are delving into cinematic storytelling today with Emma Courtland on Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host by pulling apart one episode at a time together. I'm Elaine Appleton Grant.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Emma, I'm so excited to have you here. 

Emma Courtland

I'm so excited to be here. That was such a nice introduction. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, well, I meant every word of it. And it was just so fun, too, because I was, frankly, looking back at your CV. And listeners should know Emma and I know each other, for a few years, actually. But I was looking at your CV that I never really looked at. And I was like, wow, you did some really fascinating stuff at the Academy. 

Emma Courtland

That job at the Academy was not intended to be a seven-year journey. It was just like, oh, I started in the theater because I had worked at the movie theater on my college campus, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. So this just felt like a really natural thing to do. Watch movies for free, just make sure that people don't fall in the aisles. Great. And from there, I just sort of got plucked up and brought into the Science and Technology Council's film programming team.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Who gets plucked up from like selling popcorn to—I mean is that what you were doing? Like you were an usher? 

Emma Courtland

No, there was no popcorn. There is no food at the Academy's theater, but—no, I just check people in it. It's a membership organization. So you just check in the members—you know, occasionally there are big events that are open to the public, but…It's a delightful little gig if you can get it.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I was so fascinated by the fact that you worked at the Academy, and you did a lot of programming around horror movies, which I thought was an interesting background to do a crime show. 

Emma Courtland

I was doing Sci-Tech programming. Genre films are the kinds of films that have—you know, you look at Academy Award nominees from every year, and the movies that get Best Picture nominations are of an ilk—you know, war movies, whatever. And the technical awards are genre movies. So frequently. Star Trek, Lord of the Rings. Like those are the movies. American War Wolf in London, those are the movies that'll be nominated in tech categories. So almost all my programming. That's such a funny connection, I never even thought about that. Yeah, but I also love genre storytelling, which is again, totally accidental. It's all totally accidental. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

But it makes sense. I mean, so much of our careers are accidental and then you look back at the threads, or somebody else looks back at those threads, as I did, and notices them. So yeah, it was fun. Let me get to, though, why we're really here. 

So what I like to do when I start episodes, start interviews, the whole process starts with—I'm inviting somebody on and then saying, tell me either a show you loved or a show that was very challenging to make. And in this case, you told me about one episode that met both of those criteria. You loved this episode, but it was very challenging to make. That is Paging Dr. Barnes.

Paging Dr. Barnes is a mind-blowing story about a guy who pretended quite successfully to be a doctor for decades. I wanna talk about how you introduced this piece because I listened to it when it first came out, so that was September 2021. And the first time I listened, I didn't know the backstory of what had happened at your shop among your team. And I loved it, it was great. 

But the second time I listened, which was quite recently, my jaw literally dropped, because the introduction is so beautiful and now I understand why you—what went into it. Like this introduction makes so much sense with the reason you did this and we're gonna talk about it after I play it. So here is the introduction to this particular episode, Paging Dr. Barnes. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: To anyone who knows Steve Barnes, it should come as no surprise that one of his earliest memories—and certainly his most vivid memory—is the day that his dad, Gerald, first introduced him to baseball. 

Steve Barnes: He took me to my first game. I wasn't even two years old. And they carried me through the tunnel at Wrigley Field. And I remember seeing how beautiful and green it was, that not even two years old. I have that memory planted in my mind, 60 something years later, where I could tell you exactly what it looked like. It was the most beautiful, lush, gorgeous thing I ever saw in my life. 

Emma Courtland: It wasn't just the beauty of the field that seared that day into Steve's memory. It was the fact that that beauty had been shared with him by his dad. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So here's what you had told me. You said, you almost scrapped this story of this guy who pretended to be a doctor, that it just wasn't working. So tell me that story. What was the story you thought you were gonna tell and why didn't it work? 

Emma Courtland

Well, my producer Mitch has an amazing sense of like turns, how a story unfolds. And the scene that he'd imagined as the cold open was the scene where this guy comes into the hospital, this clinic in Southern California. He walks in and he's experiencing these symptoms. He's cold all the time. He's insatiably hungry, he is insatiably thirsty, and he doesn't know what's wrong with him. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: This one day in December, 1979, Rick had the day off.

A man named John McKenzie had come into the clinic for medical attention. He was 29 years old and recently divorced. And he said he was feeling strange. He told Dr. Barnes that he felt dizzy. He said he was constantly thirsty, constantly hungry. And no matter how much he ate or drank, the feeling wouldn't go away. He also said he was losing weight and peeing all the time. Dr. Barnes told McKenzie he was suffering from a benign positional vertigo, the diagnostic equivalent of nothing to worry about. Still, Barnes drew some blood, prescribed some anti-dizziness medication, and sent McKenzie on his way. But the next day, when the blood work came back, Dr. Barnes was out of the office. So the paperwork on McKenzie was handed to Rick to review. According to the report, John McKenzie had a glucose level of nearly 1200. 

Rick: Normal is 80 to 110.

Emma Courtland: Over 10 times the norm. And his list of symptoms? Peeing a lot and insatiable thirst? 

Rick: First year medical students know what diabetes is and what their presenting complaints are, okay? 

Emma Courtland: John McKenzie was on the verge of a diabetic coma. 

Rick: That scared me to death. So I said, we need to get hold of this guy and get him back in here. 

Emma Courtland: Rick ran to reception, pulled McKenzie's file, and called all of his emergency contacts. When no one got back, Rick decided to call the cops. The cops showed up to McKenzie's place, and when no one came to the door, they kicked it down. And in the kitchen, they found John McKenzie's body. He laid dead on the floor. In his hand was a bottle of pills for dizziness, prescribed by Dr. Barnes. 

Emma Courtland

This is how we originally thought that the story was gonna begin. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And it's a really powerful scene. I mean, it makes sense that you would think that. 

Emma Courtland

Absolutely. The problem was that we were following this guy who does like—you know, Dr. Barnes gets discovered, blah, blah, blah. And later he'll have another run in with Dr. Barnes, where he is once again the guy to reveal Dr. Barnes. There is no change in this person, this physician assistant, who we thought that we were gonna follow. There is no change in him. 

And also to him, Dr. Barnes is a little bit of a two-dimensional character. Because when you have a serial crime, somebody commits a crime over and over again, especially the same crime over and over again, you're like, What is going on with that person? And that's the real question. And it's something that this person, this physician assistant, could not engage with because he didn't know him, really. I mean, you know, they worked together for a couple months, really? So that story felt flat. It felt like it wasn't actually a story. There was no journey for this guy to go on. It was a series of discoveries. 

So there are three story registers, right? So there's external, internal, and philosophical. These are the three dimensions of storytelling. A great story will touch on all three of them. Good stories touch on two, and bad stories touch on—are just one. Usually true crime lives in the space of external. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And external is, explain that. 

Emma Courtland

It's what happened. It's a detailing of what happened from a distance, right? It's like—usually crime stories are told from investigators.

But they can only begin to wrestle with what it feels like to be a participant in this. They can only sort of engage with that. They can tell us a little bit about what it means sometimes. That's the philosophical component. 

Internal is what our show always tried to deliver as well. And we ended up getting that from someone else. And that changed our story. And listening to that thing that we were all feeling that this is—that this feels hollow, this feels like we don't have that internal thing and we could have that internal register—that's what made the story. And that's why we start with this baseball tape. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right, so what you told me was that you literally almost just killed the story after you'd presumably spent probably months working on it. 

Emma Courtland

We were definitely on this for months, but we had done two drafts of the story with the physician assistant as our primary story mule. Story mule is the person—that's the phrase that we used for the person that we are following through the arc of the story. And it was just so—it just felt empty. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And so at first you thought, we just don't have a story here, we're gonna have to kill it. But then you came to the conclusion that there was a story here, and the story comes from the point of view of this con artist's son, Steve. And Steve is the guy who you just heard in the introduction to this story, in the introduction to the episode, saying, I remember my first memory. I wasn't even two years old, going to Wrigley Field. Tell me what was going on in your team that took you on this little narrative arc of your own—oh no, we have a story that's not gonna work, we're just gonna throw it out—to: wait a minute, there's something different happening here. 

Emma Courtland

Well, I mean, part of this is necessity and part of it is just that I think that we all felt that there was magic to this guy, Steve. We had started interviewing Steve. Steve had had a front row seat to the whole journey and the whole idea behind interviewing Steve was just so that we could bring some humanity to this figure of Dr. Barnes, who had always felt so far away and we had so many questions about his motivations and we'd reached out to Steve partly as due diligence, but also partly because we were so curious about like how he felt and what he saw and what he thought. So he was going to be this side character, who was going to help us answer the question of, but who really is Dr. Barnes? That's how we had intended to use him.

But after we'd laid everything out and our primary story meal felt so hollow, we were just like, let's try this. We didn't have a scene. We always like to begin on a scene and we didn't have a scene with Steve. But once we looked at what was there, there was really just a moment of trusting that what we had found was special and actually listening to what was in the tape. And that's where we found baseball. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Well, I thought it was really beautiful. And like I said, when I understood that the first story, the one you almost threw out, was about a con artist and about his crimes, but that this story is about the relationship—and it really is just beautiful all the way through, and highs and lows—then when I listened to that introduction, I was like, Ah, this is pretty magical. So what you do is you go from basically his memories and—Steve really idolized his father. And then you pose the turn to the whole story, this setup. And I wanna play this for everybody. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: So Steve grabs the newspaper. 

Steve Barnes: I go into the stall and, you know, I'm reading the newspaper while I'm doing my business. 

Emma Courtland: He's taking his time flipping through pages. And that's when Steve sees this article. 

Steve Barnes: About my dad being arrested. 

Emma Courtland: Dr. Gerald Barnes had been arrested at the Irvine Clinic, where for three years he'd worked as a physician and then as medical director. 

Steve Barnes: I felt like someone just absolutely came into the bathroom stall and went, wham, and gave me a really hard gut punch. It knocked the air out of me like I was in a daze. 

Emma Courtland: Do you remember what parts of the article stood out to you most? 

Steve Barnes: Yeah, my dad's in jail. That's pretty simple. And just the sheer blindsided fraud of it all. I was blindsided. 

Emma Courtland: Again and again, over the next 25 years, the articles, the fraud and that blindsided feeling would repeat in sequence, like the steps in some tragic dance, until only one thing was clear. Steve had no idea who his father really was. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And that turned out to be the mystery, right? That was really the peg that you hang the entire episode on, is this very confused relationship. Who is my father? In a much bigger way than most of us have to ask that question. 

Emma Courtland

And I think that you don't—when you are at a distance from this, right? Like you think, why would this guy do this? Like that is the driving question, from the outside, right? When we're on the outside, we're looking at this, and we can be like, why is this happening? What's he doing? What's going on with this guy? 

But ultimately, when you are on the internal register, who is he? is really the driving question, because it says something about who am I? Who are we? What does this have to do with—how does this affect our relationship? And it really took us listening to our tape to figure that out. 

Planning is so important. Having a skeleton, having a pre-visualization of what you want your story to be—and then being willing to to actually listen. Listen to what people are telling you. There is a story that has been reported and then there is the story that it has been lived. And oftentimes…

You know, I think this came out in the 90s, like early 90s, that this story was primarily being reported?  Steve had not had an occasion to talk about this, you know, publicly since then. And the magic of hindsight is so incredible because more than anything, the details were like wishy-washy. He didn't remember what happened on this time that it happened or that time, but like, he had this clarity of hindsight where he really knew what the whole thing meant to him and he really knew how he felt about it. 

Also talking to sources who have been in therapy, who have done a lot of processing, is one of the most beautiful things there is. This guy Steve, he doesn't really talk in terms of psychology. He talks relationally. He was so plugged into how he felt about stuff and it was really beautiful.

Elaine Appleton Grant

And that's a remarkable thing to find. And it's a little bit rare. Did you have all of the tape you needed? Or once you made the decision, did you then go back to Steve for more? 

Emma Courtland

No, we had everything. And in part because it wasn't our primary interview, we—the baseball stuff? Sports becomes a huge through line in the story. And I hadn't written any questions about sports. I hadn't written—you know, there were so many questions that I had asked of Steve that were warmup questions that we used. Almost everything you hear here in the cold open was a warmup question. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Tell me what the warmup question was. 

Emma Courtland

Oh, so once somebody's agreed to do an interview with us, they've been pre-interviewed, like we know mostly the beats of their story. We at least know generally that they can deliver the beats of their story. I don't know the contours of them. That's the thing that I'll be looking for.

But they know that they're gonna be asked to sit down with a stranger, someone they've never spoken to and talk about what is probably the worst experience of their life. And you can't just jump into that. You cannot just ask people to do that cold. And also it's not the style of interviewing that I was trained in, right? So sometimes I'll ask these kinds of—form of questions. This is a very oral history warmup question, but I’ll ask…

Tell me the story of how you got your name. It's one of my favorite ones. It is a great question to start with because it is very specific, but it also allows them to take that question wherever they go. Usually what ends up happening is people will tell you a little bit about their parents, and you can gauge from what they tell you, how—you can learn so much about somebody. Also, you can learn about ethnic history, their relationship to ethnicity. You can learn about relationship to—your parents' relationship to—just, there's so much that can be learned from that question. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's a great question. I have never heard of that as a warmup question. Tell me how you got your name. 

Emma Courtland

No, tell me the story of how you got your name. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

The story of how you got your name, sorry. 

Emma Courtland

Yeah, and there's a difference. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I know the difference, but you tell me the difference. 

Emma Courtland

The difference is, tell me how you got your name. It's like, oh, my mom chose it. Tell me the story of how you got your name is asking to narrativize something. Just like what just happened—you might not register the difference in repeating it, but there is something to—tell me the story of whatever. Tell me about the moment that something happened. There is a signal there that says, this is your time. Don't think that this is boring. This is actually what I'm asking for. You know what I mean? 

I think a lot of people are trained to dismiss their own stories as being boring, especially stories about everyday things like your name. That's boring, why would you wanna hear about that? Doesn't matter, I asked. I've extended you an invitation to tell me a story right out of the gate. 

And sometimes it backfires and somebody ends up wanting to tell you 15 minutes of family history. But I'm game as long as it's interesting.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah, tell me a couple of others.

Emma Courtland

I think that for him, I wanted some early memories, not that I thought I was going to use them. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right. So you asked what's your first memory?

Emma Courtland

No, I didn't ask what was your first memory. Just like, tell me about what you remember from your childhood with your dad. Like things that you remember about being young. The Wrigley Field, I never thought in a million years that we were going to use that. There would be no place for that. But I listened to it and you hear his voice and he's like, the grass at Wrigley Field, it's the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. And you can picture it and you can feel the thing he's feeling and you can feel being small, being on the shoulders of someone who is so much bigger than you, and coming through this dark tunnel and opening up onto this light and this absolutely explosive, overwhelming green. The significance of that is something that you can feel whether you love baseball or have zero interest in baseball. You understand that this is like being at temple, this is like being at church for people. You can feel that entering a stadium. 

What he describes as a religious experience and what ends up happening you see is like, that's their church, they go together and that is where they have their most meaningful conversations. It's the focal point of their relationship. 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: Steve remembers this one time.

Steve Barnes: We're at Dodger Stadium. We're having a great time. You know, we're buying each other beers and enjoying the ball game and everything. And I look at him and I go, so you're doing anything illegal again? Oh no, promise, I'm not. Da da da da da da da da. 

Emma Courtland: Not long after, Steve found out that Gerald was, in fact, up to his old tricks. Again. 

Emma Courtland

Another piece that I use in this is, he tried to teach me how to run. And so I would go out there and he's like, you run like your mother. You know, cute things like that that tell you so much about this relationship and so much about Dr. Barnes. That's internal. That's the internal. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And it becomes much more of a character study. Like you said, you're seeing somebody change over time and we definitely see Steve, the son, change dramatically over time. And yet, like most lives, it's not just a smooth arc, you start here and you wind up there. It's more, there's ups and downs along the way, there's big change and there's small change and it goes back and forth. As in a real life, it's very emotionally textured, this story. 

And also, I loved hearing you describe what the baseball wound up meaning to you, as well as to him, because you described it in such cinematic terms, which of course is where I sort of started from, is that this is very much this piece, such a movie in my head. 

And I have a question about that. So I think that we producers listen to shows in very different ways than most listeners do, because we know the architecture, the kind of stuff that you're talking about right now, and the pre-interviews and the setup and the storyboarding and the—headaches and thinking that go into making a story. 

But once it's made, it sounds easy. And one of the least understood pain points is that most of us are not natural born storytellers. I don't know how many times I've heard a great story in my head, and then the source or the guest is a terrible storyteller and you get horrible tape and you just can't do it, right? So Steve is amazing, but I am betting that you helped to some degree. And—or maybe not, there are people who are that good. 

But he describes just in that one clip we listened to that it was like somebody punched him. He got the wind knocked out of him. That's a very sensory detail. Did you help Steve along the way? Did you say what did it feel like at different points? 

Emma Courtland

Yeah, of course. But there's—yeah, this is compiled. In the cold open, there is tape from the beginning of our conversation, the middle of our conversation, the end of our conversation. There is tape from all over the place. That's a strategic thing. I always feel like a lot of times you need a second take of a story. You are listening to someone tell a story and they don't actually use—they've told you who they're talking about like five minutes ago, but they didn't say, my dad did this, or whatever the hell. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

There's a lot of pronouns. There's a lot of he and people also are not very faithful to—when they change the person they're talking about, they're still using he, and you get lost. 

Emma Courtland

Yeah. I generally think that people are good storytellers. Narrative is the primary mode of human cognition. We are telling ourselves stories. That's how we define identity. You know, this is what it is to be a human being, to live in a world of narrative and to experience the world through narrative that is being revised constantly. 

I think that what happens is that as we revise it, we can sort of bend our story. We change our story, it's changes. That story gets changed as we go through our lives. And sometimes those changes interrupt the flow of the story. 

Also, I have ADHD and I recognize it in other people when there's an abundance of enthusiasm, and you are in the middle of a story, and then another thought comes right in, and you're like— and the thing about that is—without finishing your first sentence. That happens all the time, and really it's just, my job is to be there. And a lot of times, almost always, I had a producer with me in interviews. So between the two of us, we are listening to figure out, did we actually get the moment that we thought we got? So with Steve, Steve is…Steve is sitting on the toilet, which, oh my God, the fact that I was able to get a toilet moment at the very beginning of this very heartwarming story was such a delight for me. But he's sitting on the toilet, he's reading the newspaper, he reads a story about his dad. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And he's at Dodger Stadium. 

Emma Courtland

He's at Dodger Stadium, yeah. He's at Dodger Stadium, he reads a story about his dad. We don't know what the story says, but he's hit with a feeling. And I think Steve was the one who said, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut. I think he said that, but I had to unpack that. And so later on he says something about the sheer blindsided fraud of it all.

We needed that because a gut punch can be so many things. And so to understand specifically what is underneath that feeling, that's where we really get the humanity, is in the specificity of that feeling that we all know. There's the universal thing and then there's the really specific thing. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

You brought up something I was gonna ask you about. You are an oral historian with a master's from Columbia. I'm curious, tell me one technique that you used for creating this story or doing interviews for this story that is unlike something a journalist is trained to do. What's the difference? 

Emma Courtland

Well, in audio journalism, I don't know how much difference there is. But I'm not the story, ever, which is not a signature of journalism. But it's definitely different from traditional print journalism, where I'm not just looking for the facts, I'm looking to tell a story and I'm looking for the meaning of the story for the person. Which—the meaning of the story for them, that is not something that journalists are supposed to be very concerned about. You make the meaning. You get the facts of what happened and then you decide—you lay them out and you decide what that means.

We have a pilot episode that is about—there's a little girl who supposedly dies in a fire, but there is a question of, what happened? Was very under-examined by the police and the fire department. And I remember somebody raising a flag about racism. This is a Puerto Rican family. That the reason that they didn't do more to investigate what happened with this fire was because they didn't care about this family. These lives were not high priority. And that may be true. But I could talk to the family. 

And, you know, race and class are, in this country, very interconnected. But I asked specifically about race. And to them, this was about the value, the monetary value of their lives. This was also a poor family. And this was what it meant to them. They were like, our lives didn't matter in terms of dollars and cents. And that's the answer I fucking went with, because I'm not gonna tell you—I'm not gonna look at your experience, especially your trauma, and if you don't think that the core of this is racism and the story isn't about infrastructure, isn't about racist systems, why would I do that? 

This is about what this moment meant for you. And I think that I feel the same way about Steve. I could have someone assess what's going on with Dr. Barnes, what was motivating him, whatever. That's almost less interesting to me than what Steve thinks is going on and how Steve feels. That's the oral historian approach. It is inviting your subjects into the meaning making.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I love that. I love that it comes through. It absolutely comes through. And I think that's the part of what makes this very special and very different than other true crime—other just plain narrative shows, really.

So you mentioned the question of race and ethnicity and class, which is a big deal in true crime reporting. A lot of questions around the ethics of true crime reporting. And you are Latina. And you had some feelings about being a Latina podcaster and how people use their identity or not as podcasters. Tell me what you feel about that.

Emma Courtland

I'm Mexican, but I'm also Jewish. And I think that that's the thing that informs so much of the work, is that it’s sort of like two realities existing at the same time. I don't speak Spanish well at all. I can understand much more than I can speak, but I wasn't raised by my Mexican father. And as much as Mexico and Mexican culture was very present in my life as a child, I think that being multi-ethnic more informs my perspective on the world than anything else. And because of that, I feel like I can perform my identities. I can show up—I can show up more Jewish, I can show up more Mexican in any one moment. 

In the true crime space, a lot of hosts choose to show up as themselves and to drive stories forward with an I, with a capital I. It is their journey. It is their point of view. And that I feel like that is a very reporter, a very journalistic move. Or it's an untrained move, right? Where it's just like you haven't spoken to anyone and you've only done very surface research, and so, you know, you're not an expert in anything. So all you can give is just your gut feelings about something. It's a visceral reaction, which is totally valid, but it's just not schooled. 

I very purposely don't do those things. When I use an I, I do it very intentionally. I do it almost never. And it's always a point of a big discussion. And part of that is because a lot of these stories have an undercurrent of advocacy. It's true crime and that's such a funny, strange, big umbrella, but one of the things about—in the genre that's really dirty is the sense that it really tends to have very binary black and white. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Right and wrong. 

Emma Courtland

And I do think that by holding back my identity, by holding back myself, I am better able to drive empathy. And when you get to hear from the people who've experienced something, especially if they've done something bad, or if they're telling you that they love somebody who did something bad. And you can say that's a bad thing to do, and still feel for that person. That's the whole goal. 

I sometimes think that leading with yourself, leading with your politics, leading with your point of view, robs your listener of the opportunity to get there on their own. But it's a complicated question because I suspect that the show would be more popular if I were more saleable, if I made myself more of a brand. But I suspect that it would undermine the goals of the show, which are to drive empathy, which are to allow people to walk down roads that they would not otherwise walk down, to trouble the lines between good and bad, to really live in that sense of gray. I do think that being multiethnic allows me to live in multiple spaces and inhabit different perspectives in a way that's just built into the way that I walk through the world. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I love that. I love that. That's beautiful. Yeah, that's really nice. Tell me about a scene that was not in the original script, the one that you scrapped, but that's in this one and that you really love. 

Emma Courtland

Oh, I mean, Steve Barnes, his dad gets arrested. And I'm like, tell me about the first time you went to go see your dad in prison. His dad has been locked up for the first time. And this is like a nice Jewish family. You know, they don't know people who are in jail, right? So they're like, this is a very strange experience. So what does Steve do for his dad? 

Clip from Crime Show

Emma Courtland: He stopped by a local Jewish deli and bought some of his dad's favorite foods. Security at the prison was minimal, so they'd actually be able to eat together and talk. 

Steve Barnes: So that was the next time I saw him. I asked him, you know, what's going on? And he goes, well, you know, I kind of made a mistake. And, you know. 

Emma Courtland: And that was more or less the end of it. And then, after serving 18 months in a California penitentiary, Gerald Barnes was released in January of 1983. It was a new year, a new start. 

Emma Courtland

It was just such an endearing thing. Again, nobody reports that part of the story. Nobody's like, And then his son went to the deli and he got cold cuts, he got his hand sliced corned beef. No, that's not anywhere. But those are the moments that he really remembered. And those are the moments that stuck with me because they felt so human. Like what strange circumstances, but some things just—tradition, you know? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah, well, and also I think it makes it so three-dimensional. You can imagine this journey, this guy's really nervous, he's going to see his father in prison, which is crazy. And so he goes into a comfortable place and he picks up this very real specific stuff. And you can picture them sitting down at the prison…

We are just about out of time. And so I have a couple big questions for you. 

What's your philosophy of true crime? 

Emma Courtland

We tell stories for a purpose. One of the reasons it's so hard to make the show is because we don't say yes to every story. There are really good yarns that don't actually lead anywhere, that don’t amount to something that feels educational. One of the things in our secret sauce is like, what does this mean, though? It needs to mean something, especially if people get injured. If people are hurt, I don't know why we'd be talking about that if it didn't mean something. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

What does this story about Dr. Barnes in the end mean? What did you decide it meant? 

Emma Courtland

We have the meaning for Steve, which is like the one that's the most tangible, right? But then there is this other thing, and that is about the American medical system and the California Medical Board. 

There's this burning question through most of the story, which is how does he keep getting away with this? How do people keep hiring him? Isn't anyone checking his references? And the answer to that question says something. You know, we found the answer to that question. And that says something about the American medical system. 

What we're actually looking at in all of these things is that we have all of these systems that are designed to keep us safe, that provide so many guard rails, and a lot of them have really major loopholes. And they aren't really doing the thing that we hope they would do. 

It's always really nice when you can say that that loophole got closed. But I will tell you that when we talked to the California Medical Board, I didn't feel like it fully had been. I didn't feel like they had made me feel more—I definitely feel, I felt a little bit more comfortable about it, but not much. Yeah. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Lightning round question. Yeah. What do you know about hosting now that you wish you had known when you started? 

Emma Courtland

I listened to my audition tape, essentially, the other day. And I remember thinking that I wanted to sound like one of the NPR people. This is how Ira would do it. Like you listen to it and that's a little bit what it sounds like. I'm actually—I'm not doing me. I'm doing an impression of someone that sounds like they know what they're doing. It's been a process of learning to sound like myself. And that doesn't happen immediately for everybody. I didn't know that this would be a long journey of figuring out what I sound like, and also trying to unlearn a lot of the things that I had adopted vocally that were just attempts to be taken seriously.

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, there's a lot to unpack there. Who would your dream guest for Sound Judgment be? 

Emma Courtland

Oh my gosh. Oh, I mean, Avery Trufelman is—I mean, she's the bee's knees. She was one of the 99% Invisible producers, but then she made a show called Articles of Interest, which was a spin-off series of just her own—in the style of their show—about clothing. Then she made Nice Try Utopia, which was hugely lauded, and then she became the host of The Cut for a stint. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I'll keep an eye out. I'm keeping a running list. 

Emma, thank you for this very thoughtful approach to the work and being willing to unpack it with me. It's fascinating.

Emma Courtland

You're so welcome. It's been fun.

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you just a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are a few from today. I'll put many more in the show notes.

1. There are three story registers or dimensions: external, philosophical, and internal. A great story has all three. A good story has two and a bad story only one. The internal story—that's the hardest one to get, but the one that's often what makes the richest, most memorable story. We kind of get inside our protagonist's head and their heart.
2. The warmup question has come a long way from the sound check question, what did you have for breakfast? If you've ever been in a radio or a voiceover studio, you've heard that one. A great warmup question from Emma is, tell me the story of your name.
3. It's important to use the word story when you ask questions like that. As Emma says, we human beings tend to dismiss our own stories as boring or unimportant. By asking someone to tell you the story of their name or the story of something else, you're extending an invitation and saying, no, it is important. I really wanna know you. 

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Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound Design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell, and project management and all the things by the inimitable Tina Bassir. See you soon.