March 26 - April 1
Hello, folks! In a week with one of the most highly anticipated podcast releases in the history of the medium, I couldn't help but turn the brunt of my attention to S-Town. As is always the case, there were of course a lot of other high quality episodes that passed through my ears. But this was by far the thing that consumed by attention and had me eagerly hitting the play button on every leg of my commute. Basically, it's all about S-Town this week. Though what follows doesn't trade much in spoilers, I would definitely suggest listening to all episodes of the show (in sequential order by chapter) here: https://stownpodcast.org/
Alright, let's start with the tension between building a story steadily and opening the floodgates to consumers in the style of Netflix to promote binge listening. Unlike their previous smash hit Serial, which unfolded in weekly installments, the producing team from This American Life deemed it best to release all seven parts of S-Town at the same time. While the pleasure center in my brain was satiated during the time I spent listening, the time between episodes of Serial allowed the stories (from seasons one and two) to cement themselves in my mind. Furthermore, this reprieve helped me to think critically about the various pieces of information presented and aided in forming my own opinion about the characters and details encountered each week. I recognize that under the current system I was granted the freedom to pace myself, but as a naturally impatient human this didn't even cross my mind until after the fact.
Release methodology aside, let's get into the content of the show itself. My initial thoughts on the story, through perhaps the first two chapters, trended toward admiration for the craft of reporter Brian Reed. The subject matter was compelling enough, but I didn't care too much about any of the people involved. About mid way through the third chapter, I found my mind racing with some of the following thoughts:
Is this real?
How on earth did the producers get lucky enough to land this incredible story?
What are the implications of a podcast exploring a rumored cold case?
Are these producers slowly coaxing the journalistic tradition into becoming a vehicle for vigilantism?
After taking a step back, I slowly realized the protagonist at the center of this series may have had a sense for the story in mind and essentially delivered it for This American Life to unravel. We still don't know John McLemore's exact motivations for contacting a radio producer about his town, and perhaps we never will. Still, even with the caveat of having a compelling person present himself, this is an astounding accomplishment in investigative journalism. As I listened it dawned on me that this S-Town is sort of it's own genre; not exactly true crime, and much different than simply a longer form segment from This American Life. In some ways, this is exactly what I thought Serial was going to be back in the beginning when it was being touted as a show that would explore one story in a very granular fashion. That show, of course, performed the very function it had hoped...but then got even more intertwined with solving a crime. To many people, myself included, this added a level of intrigue that made the show hard to pass up. But as we saw with season two of Serial as it covered the events of the Bowe Bergdahl controversy, this created an unrealistic expectation that could not quite be reached - even if the reporting was equally fantastic.
What S-Town captured so brilliantly was not a narrative mystery in a classic "whodunnit" milieu, but the aura of an unknown place with unknown characters. Listening to the deep southern accents I often found myself marveling at the talent that these people have for language, only to have the realization that, of course, this is how these individuals have always spoken. I credit this subconscious slipping to both my own lack of exposure to people like this, and to the fact that this particular dialect tends not to get a lot of play in the larger world outside an errant soundbite or caricature in a (most likely) hokey movie playing on regional stereotypes. The juxtaposition of Mr. Reed, an outsider/coastal elite/well-educated/(well dressed/dressed at all?) person poking his nose in this unplumbed part of the country made this differences all the more glaring and poetically resonant.
The enigmatic John, central to the story, embodies this contradiction and projects the essential humanistic need to be understood in our dogma. This man of many talents certainly possesses many traits that would make him easily empathetic to a wide range of people from varying backgrounds. But what is the central tenet of this connection - why do we identify with John? It is his sense of struggle to escape something over which he admittedly has agency. Sometimes on a practical level there is absolutely no reason why life should prove to be so challenging, though petty problems persist and can amount to being a more formidable foe than we can explain. For all of his brilliance, John seemed to have a lot of tragedy haunting his daily existence.
The final note I'd like to leave on is the amazingly appropriate song choice that ties the entire show together. The S-Town team selected the Zombies song "A Rose For Emily" as a haunting coda tagging the end of each chapter. I could probably write an entire line-by-line dissection of these lyrics in the way they mirror different parts of the story in this series, but suffice to say that as the story grows (and long after the final chapter has closed) this song will bring you back again and again to thinking about the strange circumstances that fate delivers on a person.
S-Town is a singular experience in the history of the relatively young medium, and hopefully it finds the audience that Serial has managed to cultivate. This sort of world-building journalism has endless possibilities, and I trust continued efforts from This American Life and others will help to make this complex form all the more prevalent as the medium expands.
Alright, let's start with the tension between building a story steadily and opening the floodgates to consumers in the style of Netflix to promote binge listening. Unlike their previous smash hit Serial, which unfolded in weekly installments, the producing team from This American Life deemed it best to release all seven parts of S-Town at the same time. While the pleasure center in my brain was satiated during the time I spent listening, the time between episodes of Serial allowed the stories (from seasons one and two) to cement themselves in my mind. Furthermore, this reprieve helped me to think critically about the various pieces of information presented and aided in forming my own opinion about the characters and details encountered each week. I recognize that under the current system I was granted the freedom to pace myself, but as a naturally impatient human this didn't even cross my mind until after the fact.
Release methodology aside, let's get into the content of the show itself. My initial thoughts on the story, through perhaps the first two chapters, trended toward admiration for the craft of reporter Brian Reed. The subject matter was compelling enough, but I didn't care too much about any of the people involved. About mid way through the third chapter, I found my mind racing with some of the following thoughts:
Is this real?
How on earth did the producers get lucky enough to land this incredible story?
What are the implications of a podcast exploring a rumored cold case?
Are these producers slowly coaxing the journalistic tradition into becoming a vehicle for vigilantism?
After taking a step back, I slowly realized the protagonist at the center of this series may have had a sense for the story in mind and essentially delivered it for This American Life to unravel. We still don't know John McLemore's exact motivations for contacting a radio producer about his town, and perhaps we never will. Still, even with the caveat of having a compelling person present himself, this is an astounding accomplishment in investigative journalism. As I listened it dawned on me that this S-Town is sort of it's own genre; not exactly true crime, and much different than simply a longer form segment from This American Life. In some ways, this is exactly what I thought Serial was going to be back in the beginning when it was being touted as a show that would explore one story in a very granular fashion. That show, of course, performed the very function it had hoped...but then got even more intertwined with solving a crime. To many people, myself included, this added a level of intrigue that made the show hard to pass up. But as we saw with season two of Serial as it covered the events of the Bowe Bergdahl controversy, this created an unrealistic expectation that could not quite be reached - even if the reporting was equally fantastic.
What S-Town captured so brilliantly was not a narrative mystery in a classic "whodunnit" milieu, but the aura of an unknown place with unknown characters. Listening to the deep southern accents I often found myself marveling at the talent that these people have for language, only to have the realization that, of course, this is how these individuals have always spoken. I credit this subconscious slipping to both my own lack of exposure to people like this, and to the fact that this particular dialect tends not to get a lot of play in the larger world outside an errant soundbite or caricature in a (most likely) hokey movie playing on regional stereotypes. The juxtaposition of Mr. Reed, an outsider/coastal elite/well-educated/(well dressed/dressed at all?) person poking his nose in this unplumbed part of the country made this differences all the more glaring and poetically resonant.
The enigmatic John, central to the story, embodies this contradiction and projects the essential humanistic need to be understood in our dogma. This man of many talents certainly possesses many traits that would make him easily empathetic to a wide range of people from varying backgrounds. But what is the central tenet of this connection - why do we identify with John? It is his sense of struggle to escape something over which he admittedly has agency. Sometimes on a practical level there is absolutely no reason why life should prove to be so challenging, though petty problems persist and can amount to being a more formidable foe than we can explain. For all of his brilliance, John seemed to have a lot of tragedy haunting his daily existence.
The final note I'd like to leave on is the amazingly appropriate song choice that ties the entire show together. The S-Town team selected the Zombies song "A Rose For Emily" as a haunting coda tagging the end of each chapter. I could probably write an entire line-by-line dissection of these lyrics in the way they mirror different parts of the story in this series, but suffice to say that as the story grows (and long after the final chapter has closed) this song will bring you back again and again to thinking about the strange circumstances that fate delivers on a person.
S-Town is a singular experience in the history of the relatively young medium, and hopefully it finds the audience that Serial has managed to cultivate. This sort of world-building journalism has endless possibilities, and I trust continued efforts from This American Life and others will help to make this complex form all the more prevalent as the medium expands.
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