March 19, 2018
THE LIST
1. This Is Love - "A Private Life"
If life gives you lemons and also doesn't allow gay marriage, adopt your spouse!
2. Planet Money - "XXX-XX-XXXX"
Ever wonder why social security numbers became a sort of national ID? Planet Money takes us on a journey and discovers a game show where someone had their SSN read on a national TV broadcast.
3. On the Media - "Like We Used To Do"
The Mueller investigation, the West Virginia teacher's strike, and most intriguingly a pair of segments on country music and the working class. Don't be thrown by the fact that this is a couple weeks old by now, because the cultural dissection is evergreen.
HONORABLE MENTION
The Cracked Podcast- "Why Americans Hate The Poor"
Ear Hustle - "Firsts"
SOMETHING NEW
True crime. It's a genre that is apparently just screaming to package deep-dive audio series after deep dive audio series. The reasoning is pretty simple: crime is easy to divide into story arcs. Drawing on an existing story endows a property with altruistic gravitas likely to attract descriptions like "important," "fascinating" and "disturbingly American." The trusty components of such a show are, more or less: a sketch of the setting where a crime occurred, some biographical details of a suspect, biting testimony from the families of the victim, and some kind of bigger-picture conclusion crafted around the evidence presented. With the right case at the center, it's almost too hard to screw up. Almost.
Atlanta Monster is a ten-part co-production from How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV, and it does have a lot of intriguing elements. The team resurrects a decades-old case that most people in the key 18-34 listener demographic weren't alive to experience (18-34-year-olds account for 44% of podcast listeners according to Edison). The explainer-mindset of How Stuff Works shows up as the producers venture out to conduct field tests such as throwing a dummy off a bridge that is central to the case. And the roster of interviewees is quite impressively deep. FBI agents that handled the case back in the late 70s and early 80s, an advocate still pleading the case of the accused, and even a shadowy figure speaking about an alternative perpetrator all chime in. With all that going on, what could go wrong?
Well, the biggest issue is that the pieces don't quite fit together in a compelling manner. There is so much interview tape that the producers seem to have opted for light editing in favor of massive amounts of source material. This emanates some admirable transparency, but it results in a lot more rambling. This tactic is effective when you've got a property like baseball or national parks (what up, Ken Burns!) that already has an established audience who will gobble up any amount of excess information. Maybe this isn't a problem for listeners who lived in Atlanta during the wave of murders, but it certainly kept this millennial not-Atlantan from connecting with the case.
The show also suffers from a staple across all varieties of podcasts - the midroll advertisement. No one can take a relentless hour full of hard-hitting audio, but there are better ways besides chunking in ads to build in moments of reprieve. Television has been doing this since its inception, but the silver screen is a far less intimate medium than podcasting. The close bond formed between listeners and hosts can be effectively leveraged to sell a product, but it is also much more fickle relationship prone to ruinous meddling. After listening to A Very Fatal Murder it's nearly impossible not to hear podcast advertising as ridiculously gaudy and misplaced, and that is painfully the case in Atlanta Monster.
Taken as a multi-part work of investigative rigor, this podcast is fine. In fact, to imply the producers fatally deviated from the mores of the typical macabre cold-case podcast is unfair. The show simply riffs on a familiar model while synthesizing disparate elements that don't ultimately result in something too coherent. This is more thought-provoking than the growing list of non-fiction shows that rally around the near-procedural nature of criminal docudrama. And I should note that I'm running a bit of a risk issuing this take-down today - the series doesn't come out until the end of the week. Maybe the tenth and final episode will tie all of the loose ends together in a masterful way that lead me to a full-scale on-the-blog apology. But as things stand now, Atlanta Monster took a series of unspeakable crimes and somehow has me breathlessly waiting for the conclusion out of boredom.
Atlanta Monster is a ten-part co-production from How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV, and it does have a lot of intriguing elements. The team resurrects a decades-old case that most people in the key 18-34 listener demographic weren't alive to experience (18-34-year-olds account for 44% of podcast listeners according to Edison). The explainer-mindset of How Stuff Works shows up as the producers venture out to conduct field tests such as throwing a dummy off a bridge that is central to the case. And the roster of interviewees is quite impressively deep. FBI agents that handled the case back in the late 70s and early 80s, an advocate still pleading the case of the accused, and even a shadowy figure speaking about an alternative perpetrator all chime in. With all that going on, what could go wrong?
Well, the biggest issue is that the pieces don't quite fit together in a compelling manner. There is so much interview tape that the producers seem to have opted for light editing in favor of massive amounts of source material. This emanates some admirable transparency, but it results in a lot more rambling. This tactic is effective when you've got a property like baseball or national parks (what up, Ken Burns!) that already has an established audience who will gobble up any amount of excess information. Maybe this isn't a problem for listeners who lived in Atlanta during the wave of murders, but it certainly kept this millennial not-Atlantan from connecting with the case.
The show also suffers from a staple across all varieties of podcasts - the midroll advertisement. No one can take a relentless hour full of hard-hitting audio, but there are better ways besides chunking in ads to build in moments of reprieve. Television has been doing this since its inception, but the silver screen is a far less intimate medium than podcasting. The close bond formed between listeners and hosts can be effectively leveraged to sell a product, but it is also much more fickle relationship prone to ruinous meddling. After listening to A Very Fatal Murder it's nearly impossible not to hear podcast advertising as ridiculously gaudy and misplaced, and that is painfully the case in Atlanta Monster.
Taken as a multi-part work of investigative rigor, this podcast is fine. In fact, to imply the producers fatally deviated from the mores of the typical macabre cold-case podcast is unfair. The show simply riffs on a familiar model while synthesizing disparate elements that don't ultimately result in something too coherent. This is more thought-provoking than the growing list of non-fiction shows that rally around the near-procedural nature of criminal docudrama. And I should note that I'm running a bit of a risk issuing this take-down today - the series doesn't come out until the end of the week. Maybe the tenth and final episode will tie all of the loose ends together in a masterful way that lead me to a full-scale on-the-blog apology. But as things stand now, Atlanta Monster took a series of unspeakable crimes and somehow has me breathlessly waiting for the conclusion out of boredom.
Atlanta Monster
From: Tenderfoot TV/How Stuff Works
Recommended for: New listeners to the true crime genre who haven't heard anything else in the genre of podcasts.
Drop Schedule: Fridays, Seasonal:Weekly
Average episode length: 60 minutes
Rating: Break It
From: Tenderfoot TV/How Stuff Works
Recommended for: New listeners to the true crime genre who haven't heard anything else in the genre of podcasts.
Drop Schedule: Fridays, Seasonal:Weekly
Average episode length: 60 minutes
Rating: Break It
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