Romance on the screen and on the page: Two Indicators

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 October 2024

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On today's show, we have two stories from The Indicator, Planet Money's daily podcast. They just launched Love Week, a weeklong series exploring the business and economic side of romance.

First, hosts Wailin Wong and Adrian Ma fire up the gas logs and pour a mug of cocoa to discuss the made-for-TV rom-com machine, and how television executives learned to mass produce seasonal romance.

Then, Wailin and host Darian Woods discuss another romance medium: the romance novel. Once relegated to supermarket aisles, these books are now mainstream. And authors, an often-maligned group within publishing, have found greater commercial success than many writers in other genres. We find out how romance novelists rode the e-book wave and networked with each other to achieve their happily-for-now status in the industry.

This episode is hosted by Erika Beras, Wailin Wong, Adrian Ma, and Darian Woods. These episodes of The Indicator were originally produced by Julia Ritchey and engineered by Kwesi Lee. They were fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon is The Indicator's Editor.

You can listen to the rest of the series at The Indicator's feed, or at npr.org/love

Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

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Transcript

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0:22.0	So there's this running joke that you can basically generate a holiday romcom from a list of options.
0:29.0	Yeah, so start with your
0:33.7	character. Or a beat-down interior designer. Ooh or a baker and she returns to her
0:40.5	bucolic small town at Christmas time of course.
0:43.6	You know, she wants to like enter like some kind of like folksy contest or something.
0:47.3	Or maybe she has to save the family Christmas tree farm from ruin.
0:50.6	But then.
0:51.6	Then she falls for an old flame or maybe the other baker in town I don't know.
0:57.0	Ooh as long as he's wearing plaid or maybe he has a dog.
1:00.0	He always has a dog. They meet at the dog park actually.
1:02.0	Oh my gosh!
1:03.6	Holding cups of coffee that obviously don't have any coffee in them.
1:06.0	Maybe all of the above?
1:07.6	All of the above, yes. I would 100% watch that movie.
1:12.5	I actually have watched that movie multiple times.
	...

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