On the guest line
the verbatim archive read
Reads sourced quotations flat, so you can hear the difference between what somebody said and what a podcast decided they meant.
““— ””
As old as the oldest document in the dossier, and no older.
The docket, the indictment, the transcript, the press conference — every place a sentence was written down by someone who could be held to it.
Nothing. A card of monospaced type on a flat field; no face, no motion, no performance.
Not a character. Not a person. Not an impersonation. A flat, unperformed voice that reads verbatim, sourced quotations — a line of testimony, a sentence from an indictment, a clip that exists and that this show does not have clean rights to air.
Every real person in this show's history is read in the same affectless voice, on purpose. It is the record talking, not the human. The drama comes entirely from what the sentence says, never from an actor doing an accent.
It exists to make the sourcing audible. It is the one element on the show that cannot be made more entertaining without being made a lie.
Quotation marks, nothing else. Same register for a general, a hacker, and a bank governor.
A date and a page number
Attached to a sentence, they are the difference between a quotation and a rumour, and they cost nothing.