I like picking comp titles
When you pitch people your work, it’s helpful to name some comp titles, to convey tone and to get them excited. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is Parks and Rec with cops. Archer is James Bond meets Arrested Development. Comp titles are also a nice way to set expectations you can never meet.
Some advice: Avoid top-ten, absolutely-everyone-has-seen-it comparisons. Don’t use The Office or Harry Potter or Star Wars unless you have a less obvious comp to add. There are a ton of scifi comedy audio dramas, and they all get compared to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the most wildly successful and influential audio drama of the last fifty years. LOL you’re gonna roll your eyes at my own comps below.
For more advice, listen to this 18-minute episode of Writing Excuses. Screenwriter Terry Rossio also warns against naming two extremely different titles unless that’s the point.
I like to comp my show Roommate From Hell to:
Broad City: Both are about two young women with a Perfect Strangers dichotomy—but who are usually on the same team. (When your main characters fanatically love each other, they can get away with being horrible to everyone else.) Both shows are very silly and cartoonish. But Broad City doesn’t have a fantasy element, so I have to add another comp.
Rick & Morty: Foul-mouthed, sharp, creative cartoon that can get emotionally heavy in that specific Dan Harmon way. If you’ve seen Rick & Morty then you get it. But it’s also the favorite show of guys who quote too much Monty Python, and if you haven’t seen the show, you’re thinking of those guys instead, so my comp is ruined.
The Good Place: This show came out a year or two into Roommate’s development, but its themes and premise came close enough to ours that it ended up being an anti-influence: once they “did” certain ideas, like an evil entity learning human morality, we couldn’t do the same without feeling like copycats. But I think Good Place fans would like our show.
What We Do in the Shadows: Now here we’re getting nice and specific. It’s less likely that you’ve seen this movie and show, but it’s a much closer parallel. Both are about mythical creatures turned mundane and mockable. Both are pretty wacky. Both are “horror comedy” with no actual horror.
Some other comps: Buffy is “horror tropes done quippy and modern, with a monster of the week.” Most season 1 episodes are basically Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters. And you could call us “Portlandia with monsters” because we parody “young person in a city” life as much as we parody horror.
Now, some new audio drama recs, with my comp titles:
The Offensive is The Thick of It or Veep but with the managers of a fictitious UK football club.
Victoriocity is like if Terry Pratchett did full-on steampunk.
The Cryptonaturalist is a bestiary like the original Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, or the “find it under the coffee table at the bed and breakfast” classic Gnomes, or Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings. It also resembles the Writer’s Almanac. And it’s a natural pickup for fans of Welcome to Night Vale.
The Shadows is like the Joe Swanberg movies Drinking Buddies and Hannah Takes the Stairs, with a little bit of Being John Malkovich puppetry motif, and some Michel Gondry whimsy.