The Ambie Awards 2025
Nomination, Winners and Friends
This year I had the privilege of covering the Ambie Awards as joint venture between GreatPods and myself. This will be one of two posts on this award show. I’ll be posting the other half on @captainron
. This post is focused on the fiction podcast categories. Plus a winner in another category that won an Ambie with an interview with two of the creators, but…
First, let’s talk about what constitutes something as fiction in this instance. There’s the obvious “Best Fiction Podcast” category and then there’s “Best Performance in Audio Fiction,” and since a lot of shows are indie in this space.
Best Fiction Podcast Nominees and Winner
The nominees for the 2025 Ambie Awards’ Best Fiction Podcast were:
Dragon Age: Vows and Vengeance
The Coldest Case: The Past has a Long Memory
The Justice
The Last City
The Seneschal: A Rebel Moon Story
Tom Slick: Mystery Hunter
Half of these nominees are part of Amazon and their subsidiaries like Audible and Wondery. The other shows: Tom Slick, The Seneschal, and Dragon Age are from iHeart Media, Netflix and Electronic Arts respectively. The companies Wolf at the Door Studios and School of Humans are also listed on the Ambies website as helping with the latter two productions on the above list. You can also check out my review of Tom Slick by clicking the link above. Aside from it and Dragon Age: Vows and Vengeance, the other five nominees (including the winner) haven’t been listened to at the time of this writing. With the Dragon Age audio drama, I only listened to the first two episodes. To keep it short, I enjoyed the first much more than the second. Though, I did have problems with the repetitiveness of some things in the inaugural episode. At the very least, it was entertaining. Moving on from the age of dragons. Let’s reveal the winner in the “Best Fiction Podcast” category:
The winner this year was Tales of Fists & Fireballs from ADHx2. From the cover art, it’s an anthology series and the only one in the category. I’ll let conspiracists tackle that particular interesting bit of information. Speaking of Conspiracies…
What Happened in Skinner - The Best Indie Winner is Also Fiction?
The winner for best indie podcast was for the second season of What Happened to Skinner. Its blend of alternate reality game mechanics and true crime style makes one wonder why this isn’t more a thing in the audio drama space. The answer to why it’s not may surprise you. Google emailed them asking if they gave false information on their whois registration. Aaron Blanton explained how it was an alternate reality game about a fictional town in Oregon. Blanton summed up Google’s response as “Cool story, bro. We don’t care. We’re taking down your website.”
While the website for the fictional town of Skinner lived a short life on Google, it wasn't the only way Mazama Entertainment played with people’s perception of reality. Sites like Reddit became places where the creative team could influence the story coming up through posts from throwaway accounts both plants by the producers and real people. Of course, you can’t control how people are going to react to something. And sometimes, the audience influences the story more than the story influences the audience. Blanton said, “A lot of times that [nudging the audience in a specific direction] works, but occasionally they'll react to things in ways that we don't expect them to,” Blanton said regarding a time when season one’s original plan was accidentally thwarted by audience speculation and reactions that made the old path obsolete.
A Discordant Greek Chorus
In addition to Reddit, Discord became a hub for amateur sleuths and fans of the show. Sometimes the posts went in another direction, causing lines to be re-recorded a day before the episode dropped. Producer for season two, Estelle Olivia, explains this push and pull between where the story planned to go and where the audience expectations were:
“There are times that I sit there watching the discord and we have an episode that has to go out. We need them to crack a code and help us find some evidence that we're going to use to produce the next episode. We also have a release date and a deadline, and I'm sitting there watching them go in the wrong direction.”
Best Performance in Audio Fiction
The next category relating to fiction is the best performance in a fiction podcast. This year the nominees were:
The cast of Hot White Heist 2 (Audible/Broadway Video)
The cast of Ominous Thrill (Jeff Schmidt Productions, LLC)
Tisha Campbell for Snoriezzz (Working Women Productions)
Fredi Bernstein, Cody Wilkins and Dana Domenick for The Box (Tetra Stories)
Sanaa Lathan for The Justice (Audible, James Patterson Entertainment, and Broadway Video)
Ruth Righi for Winnie Taylor's 4th & Inches (GZM Shows)
You’ll notice Audible has two shows on this list. Hot White Heist 2 and a story from thriller author James Patterson. The first of these two shows was nominated in three other categories including Podcast of the Year. It didn't win any awards this year, despite having the most nominations out of everyone. Of course it wasn’t all bad news for the cast and crew of Hot White Heist 2. Current Saturday Night Live actor Bowen Yang not only starred in the first and second Hot White Heists, but was also nominated in the “Best Comedy Podcast” category for Las Culturistas, hosted by Yang and Matt Rogers.
Rogers, seen above at the winner’s circle, thanking the people behind the scenes. More videos from the ceremony coming soon.
Best Scriptwriting, Fiction
The nominations for Best Scriptwriting in a fiction podcast were:
Anthony Del Col for Don’t Listen to This (BBC Studios)
Matthew Castellanos and Brett Melnick for Faraway (Sonoro)
Mac Rogers for Give me Away (Gideon Media)
David Singer and CK Pahlow for Incoming Past Tense Future Perfect (Next Missiun)
Ed Sellek for Money Gone (Naked Productions)
Matthew Star for The Best Man’s Ghostwriter (Audible/Broadway Home Video)
The award this year was given to Anderson Cook and Sidney Butler for Academy (Wondery and AT WILL MEDIA).
One fun fact about Academy is that Briggon Snow (Caleb from The Bright Sessions) is a producer on this show according to the podcast’s IMDB page. The trailer and first episode dropped in 2023 with the remaining nine episodes releasing publicly in 2024. There was a six month gap between episode one and episodes 2–10 where the entire show was exclusive to Wondery’s premium subscription service. All episodes dropped on January 20, 2023 for Wondery+ and would remain behind the paywall until episode two dropped to the public on January 29, 2024. Episodes 3-10 publicly released on the same day. All episodes using Wondery+ are ad-free.
The story is a coming of age story about a school in a world of “high-stakes and cut-throat competition.” AT WILL MEDIA co-produced the show alongside Wondery. The story follows Ava—a scholar student who transfers into an aggressive and upperclass boarding school called Bishop Gray Academy. There she discovers a society for those with the wealthy elite at the academy where trust is in short supply and an “alluring world where friendships will be tested, romances will bloom, and ambitions cut short.”
Out of the above nominees, the only show I listened to before the awards show was Give Me Away. For sake of time, I listened to the season one recap and more or less binged the entire second season a week before the Ambies. The idea of having people share a body and mind isn’t new in fiction, but doing it in an audio drama is quite the herculean task. The constant “Character Speaking…” line of dialogue could easily have gotten stale. Thankfully, the idea of saying who is talking aloud isn’t just a gimmick it serves a meta-contextual purpose. This didn’t click until later, but when an antagonist says he hates hearing people say who’s talking, I drew a connection with LGBT pronouns and the people against using them. I can’t say for certain if it was intentional, but the result is depth for the story’s most apparent feature.
An Outlier and Underdog in Fiction
This last category doesn’t exactly have a direct link to fiction podcasts, though without it, the medium wouldn’t exist. One can have video without audio, but audio without video needs sound in order to tell its story. The Best Production and Sound Design category’s nominees were mostly audio dramas, but its winner was not.
The fiction nominees for Best Production and Sound Design were:
White Hot Heist 2 (Audible)
Impact Winter Season Three (Audible)
Undertow Narcosis (Realm)
Nocturno: Tales From The Shadows (iHeart Media)
Hindsight: The Day Before (Radio Pictures)
The only two nominees not in considered fiction were The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi and the winner this year, Girl v Horse from Truth.Media and ESPN respectively. To say they were underdogs in a category where sound design can be seen as more optional than required for a good podcast isn’t an understatement. However, they weren’t the only ones with characteristics of an underdog.
Hindsight: The Day Before is a fictional tale about Houdini starring some big names like John Goodman. Even with a recognizable name as Goodman’s in the promotional material, it’s sound designer Ted Bonnitt and the team at Radio Pictures definitely had an uphill battle considering the other nominees backed by heavy hitters like Audible and iHeart.
Speaking of iHeart, their Best Fiction Podcast nominee — Tom Slick: Mystery Hunter— shares a lot in common with Hindsight: The Day Before. Both are fictionalized accounts of real historical people. Where they differ is how well known each of their main characters are to mainstream audience. Most people have heard of Houdini, at least compared to the number who knew about Tom Slick before the podcast. Humor is another differentiator of the two shows. The video above is a quick interview I did with Ted Bonnitt at the “Ambies Red Carpet” event. Apologies in advance for the background noise and the horrible camera shot. More videos coming soon.
This post is already getting long, so I’m postponing the interview I foreshadowed in the beginning to another article. Until next time, stay awesome Poddy People!
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