Radio Recap: Confession

Confession was an unusual true crime radio drama that aired on NBC for just one summer - July 5 to September 13, 1953. The show's conceit was that it offered tape recordings of confessions given by criminals in which they described their crimes. This had been known to be a great source of radio drama for decades - going back to Charles performing "The Moat Farm Murder" confession on a 1944 Columbia Presents Corwin series. With radio budgets being slashed circa 1953, this kind of gripping, adult fare showed what could be accomplished with minimal expenses.

Each episode of Confession begins with the criminal starting their recording, with Paul Frees addressing them and seeming to guide the conversation (although it's possible Frees' voice was added through editing). There's also a very annoying beep that goes off at regular intervals; I think it's present to make the confessions sound more realistic but it only distracts from the confessions themselves.

Confession was almost certainly trying to tap into the zeitgeist of interest in true crime that Dragnet had helped foster. Although the centerpiece of each episode is the criminal's taped confession, the bulk of the program itself is an audio recreation of the criminal's activities, performed by familiar radio actors. There are also some very unwelcome drop-ins at about the halfway mark of each broadcast where a psychologist offers commentary on the crimes being described. Not only is the neuroscience being described badly out-of-date by today's science (especially how the psychologist uses schizophrenia) but sometimes he spoils what's coming up in the audio drama. There's also a strong "crime does not pay" message that feels far too conclusory. These sequences should have been kept to the climax, if used at all.

But the show is very gripping. Music was minimal, provided primarily by a cimbalom. One episode's criminal called "Martin Everett" describes what we'd now term dissociative identity disorder as he projected his crimes upon an imaginary accomplice. At times the drama reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe's "William Wilson."

I find Confession to be a very strong radio series. You can listen to Confession in this Internet Archive playlist.