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The original podcasting juggernaut behind blockbusters Serial and S-Town is back with a six-episode podcast about the most famous orca in history: Keiko, the star of Free Willy.
The Good Whale tells the story of what happened after the hit 1993 film. Since Keiko had to learn how to be wild, he spent time being rehabilitated at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. Keiko’s story has further Oregon ties: Free Willy was shot, in part, in Astoria and many Portland locations, including downtown and Oaks Amusement Park.
The Good Whale comes out Nov. 14. The podcast is a project of Serial Productions and The New York Times. It’s hosted and co-reported by Daniel Alarcón.
The first episode lays out the cultural phenomenon of Free Willy, including the public relations nightmare that followed when people realized that the real whale from the hit film was dangerously sick and living in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City. (His dorsal fin flopped over to the side, “the orca version of an emo haircut,” as Alarcón puts it.)
What followed was an unprecedented global campaign to free Willy for real. But Keiko was not a good candidate for rewilding: He’d lived in the care of humans since he was 2 and had zero orca friends. He no longer knew how to communicate with other whales, or even how to eat live fish. These are skills no trainer in the world knew how to teach.
“At the center of it all is Keiko, who had become, almost by accident, a symbol for all whales, for the health of the oceans, for the very concept of wildness,” Alarcón narrates in the first episode of The Good Whale.
While anyone who lived through the Free Willy phenomenon the first time knows that Keiko’s signature song is Michael Jackson’s gospel-pop hit “Will You Be There,” The Good Whale also includes a musical component. The series features an original song by EGOT-winning songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman). It’s a musical imagining of Keiko’s reemergence into the wild, performed by Broadway star Jordan Fisher, with a music video that will premiere Dec. 12.
“There is a lot of genre-bending going on in The Good Whale,” says Julie Snyder, executive editor of Serial Productions, in a press release. “Because Daniel Alarcón is a novelist and a reporter, the podcast is a literary campfire epic, a scientific exploration, and then—in a bit of a left turn—it’s got a bit of Broadway musical thrown in, too.”
