In New York City, from 1980 until the mid-nineties, an artist named Allan Bridge, known to the public only as Mr. Apology, conducted a social experiment and art project from his Manhattan loft. He advertised it around town on posters with language combining step-right-up carnival-barker whimsy with straight-talking New York grit. “ATTENTION AMATEURS, PROFESSIONALS, CRIMINALS,” they read. “BLUE-COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR. YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO PEOPLE THAT YOU MUST APOLOGIZE, NOT TO THE STATE, NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!” The poster told people to anonymously call Apology, a “private experiment” unaffiliated with the police, and to “describe in detail what you have done and how you feel about it.” The messages would be recorded, the poster said, and, at some point, played for the public.
The podcast series “The Apology Line,” from Wondery, centers on the story of Bridge’s experiment, drawing on the fascinating mother lode of audio that it yielded. Many of the apologies sound like what we might expect from New Yorkers of the Mayor Koch era. “I witnessed a crime—I did not report it—down in the men’s room at Penn Station,” one caller says. Another apologizes to “one person, who’s my lover”: “I’m sorry that I’ve made his life difficult.” A cop apologizes to all those “poor souls” he’s “beat the shit out of.” We hear quavering voices, offhand intonation, earnestness, pauses, mundane details, seventies slang. “I skidded on ice and drove a car, with four of my friends, into a greenhouse, and now the owner’s out twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of roses,” a young man says. “I want to make do for it, but I really don’t have that kind of bread.” A little girl apologizes for hitting a dog that attacked her.
Listening to some of these messages can feel like we’re reading humanity’s diary, eavesdropping on the secrets of John Q. Public—they’re instantly resonant, transporting us to a state of universal empathy. But others are like reading strangers’ Internet comments, or talking to a drunk person: the dark ramblings of the lonely and bored, unreliable and a little poisonous. The podcast often squanders its wealth of the first kind of material and struggles to navigate the complexities of the second, because, like many a podcast before it, “The Apology Line” neglects the story’s most important elements in order to indulge its most exciting ones. We might begin to suspect that Allan Bridge did that, too.
“The Apology Line” is hosted by Bridge’s widow, Marissa Bridge, who narrates the story from her point of view; it’s enhanced with audio of callers’ messages, recordings of Allan, and interview clips. Marissa, a fine-art painter, met Allan in 1981. She begins the series with a description of an appealing scene—a glittering late-night dinner party, at Allan’s place—but her delivery is awkward, combining stiffness with a note of surprise. “It was early 1981, and I was with a group of friends at a loft in New York City,” she says. She sounds like someone gamely reading a script that she’s never seen before. She goes on to describe the setting: huge windows, the lights of the Empire State Building, flickering rosary candles. “We were all artists,” she says. “So we talked about our work, politics, and how we were surviving in the city.” After dinner, Allan asks the guests, “Would anyone like to hear the latest that came in today from Apology?” We hear some of the messages they listened to, which turn darkly horrifying. “I killed Henry,” a man says. “He was a neighbor. He was a classmate of mine.” He sounds giddy. A dinner-party attendee recalls, “The atmosphere in the room just shifted from this convivial post-dinner contentment to abject horror, as this incubus entered the room through the speaker.” The lights come on, the party breaks up, and they all go home.
Several callers to the Apology line claimed to have murdered people. Because Bridge had set up his art project to be anonymous and unaffiliated with the police, and had jauntily advertised it to “criminals,” murder claims were perhaps inevitable. As the project went on, Bridge got drawn in to these confessions of violence, and he drew others in, too. In 1983, he began playing some of the Apology recordings on the line’s outgoing message, allowing callers to hear and react to one another. “And it would change . . . everything,” Marissa Bridge says. A community of confessors, pranksters, and opiners began to cohere. “You’ve raved and raved / That I’m depraved,” a caller says, in a singsong tone. “The Son of Sam in a frying pan / But can you guess who I am?” One caller, sounding manic, apologizes for more than a dozen muggings. He says he stopped because he felt guilty about it, but is now reconsidering. “The opportunity you’ve given me to apologize and tell these people that I’m sorry—it’s fantastic!” he says. “I could go out tonight and start mugging again!” He then tells Mr. Apology that he’s going to track him down and kill him. “I’m going to kill you, but I’m sorry! That’ll make it all right, right?” The series shifts its focus to such calls—death threats and murder confessions. Allan Bridge begins a dialogue with Richie, a self-described serial killer of gay men, and talks to him on the phone several times; Bridge considers meeting him, entrapping him, turning him in. The two of them form a bond of sorts and have philosophical conversations about life.
Bridge, a provocateur who got caught up in his head trip, begins to seem like a proto-Internet troll lost in a fantastical realm of his own making, into which the series enthusiastically plunges us. The story about the supposed serial killer is presented as a mystery, and we can’t fully trust it—a couple of mid-series cliffhangers about the alleged murderer feel ginned up and unjustified—so, on top of not trusting many of the callers, we increasingly mistrust the podcast. The narration exacerbates this feeling: Marissa’s wooden delivery style has the unfortunate effect of making her seem unconvincing in the role of herself. “You can imagine how I felt,” she reads, flatly. “Allan and I had been married less than a year, and here Allan was telling a confessed serial killer that he was the most interesting person in his life. And honestly? That hurt.”
The most interesting ideas that “The Apology Line” evokes aren’t about serial killers. They’re suggested in its opening dinner-party scene: the role of confession in trying to absolve feelings of guilt; the possibilities inherent in secular, public apologies; the complexity of making art out of such confessions; the line between exploring the human mystery and seeking lurid entertainment. (That last tension is also central to the business of Wondery, makers of “Dirty John,” “Dr. Death,” and other pulp-noir bad-vibes investigative series.) Was Apology art? It was the subject of a show at the New Museum, in 1980, in which people sat in phone booths and listened to the tapes, and Allan had a magazine, Apology, staffed by volunteers, that shared content from the calls. Is “The Apology Line” art? That’s less clear.
The series’ other most intriguing questions involve the artist. Who was Allan? Why did he do this project, and did he find what he was looking for? What was it like to be married to him? On that final mystery, we get indications that it could be lonely. Marissa, in addition to praising Allan’s compassion and humor, tells us that Allan made little money throughout their marriage, didn’t always care about her work, could be threatened by her success, and, though they both enjoyed scuba diving, insisted on diving alone, which he was doing when he died, in 1995. Marissa tells us she realized that living a happy life after he died “meant making different choices than the ones that Allan had made.” Mr. Apology was beloved by his community of callers. “But Allan Bridge? He didn’t have many friends. He didn’t have much money. He didn’t have kids.” People are more important than art, she says. “Allan’s work was about people, but it was the people on the line that he seemed to care most about.” We might conclude that an apology central to this story is one that Allan should have made to Marissa—and, in lieu of it, Marissa, with the podcast, made one herself.
