COMING FEBRUARY 27, 2025, TO ALL PODCAST APPS
Building off the success of his hit Sonar Network podcast, You Made Me Queer! (4 Canadian Podcast Awards, 13 nominations, Apple Podcasts & Amazon Music Featured Podcast) writer, interviewer, performer, and radio maker Trevor Campbell (CBC, Toronto Life, NOW Magazine) presents Queerial, a comedic radio noir with a twisted mystery: what on earth is making everybody queer?
Why Queerial, and why now?
We find “the queer” curious, but with a slight change in inflection, “What if?” becomes “What if…” Correlation equals causation, instinct is king, and the tin-foil hat wearing hordes rush to defend our bathrooms, schools, and public libraries against (insert current queer-related moral panic here).
The dark companion to curiosity is conspiracy, and conspiracy is all the rage. In times like these, what’s a satirist with a Yeti mic to do?
Queerial sees Campbell transformed (read: wearing a fedora his brother bought him at a flea market) into Detective Campbell, the world’s only full-time queer, part-time detective. A strange contagion has descended on the city, and things reach a fever pitch when a special interest group led by a desperate mother challenges Campbell to take the case.
And because the single-season limited series is every radio network’s format du jour, he’ll do it in only ten episodes — or hang up his detective hat forever.
A seasoned interviewer (and a curious queer himself), Campbell began by interviewing a disparate group of 41 “suspicious figures.” Using the patterns and similarities that naturally arose in these conversations, he then reverse engineered the “clues” into a 10-episode scripted surrealist radio noir. Why should the moral panic pundits be the only ones who get to shoehorn a narrative?
“I’ve always thought satire was one of the most effective and entertaining ways to make a point,” says Campbell, “and I like the constraint of reality when creating fiction. Finding a way to connect these 41 conversations — with everyone from television writers and Egyptologists to reality show champions (Survivor’s Erika Casupanan) and child delinquents, recorded completely out of order — was my way of highlighting the absurdity of the conspiratorial line-drawing used to justify prejudice towards marginalized groups like the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Plus, it was a lot of fun. Remember fun?”
“I’m also an obsessive crossword puzzler, which I think is a good analogy for the project. When you make a crossword, you build the letter grid and then write the clues. Queerial is like an absurdist audio crossword puzzle. Albeit one with a text-to-speech robot sidekick and a supernatural toddler.”
The mystery is fierce but the format is simple: each episode, Campbell follows a series of leads hinging on a main theme. In the series premiere (“Buggy As Hell”), he goes digging for bugs. Interviewees include a Canadian bug breeder, an Australian cicada expert, an “insect A.I.” startup CEO, a television writer who survived a unique infestation, and a Southern radio host sent to report on the emergence of her local cicada super brood.
Over the course of the series, Campbell explores the supernatural, sacred and secular lore, biological and social contagion, extraterrestrials, the science of persuasion and domination — and bananas. Everyone kept talking about bananas.
Queerial adds a delicious spin to some of our most pressing questions surrounding conspiracy, social anxiety, and identity. Combining scripted dialogue, improv, interviews, and cinematic sound design, Queerial rips off some of your favourite hard-boiled mysteries to create a genre-defying work with something for everyone — especially queerphobes with no sense of irony.
The result is an unbelievable, white-knuckle spoof that stumbles onto the heart of the nature vs. nurture debate and the definition of “queerness” with a sense of joy, absurdity and accidental wisdom.
“Trevor Campbell is a rare find… an expertly engaging interviewer, brimming with charm, warmth and a nimble sense of humour.”
Elvira Kurt, Writer & Comedian
“[Campbell has] a comedic flair that reminds you of a young, still loveable Jim Carrey”
The Toronto Star
“Electrifyingly creative.”
The Grid
“Trevor is a great interviewer: thoughtful, surprising and fun. He brought me down paths I’d never travelled.”
Sook-Yin Lee, Actor & Filmmaker
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FIND QUEERIAL NOW ON YOUR FAV PODCAST APPS
EPISODE 1 PREMIERES FEBRUARY 27, 2025
