These are the kinds of themes that attract your attention amid an ever-crowded market of audio programs and eventually get the headphones in your ear. At times this podcast touches on small town politics, sudden death and buried treasure. But it’s right around this point that the producer’s work really begins.īrilliantly constructed with a beautiful script and audio editing quality that’s wholly unsurprising from a creative team as accomplished as this one, the show balances real-life twists and turns with a more intimate tale. It’s in episode two that we learn the murder that brought him to Alabama in the first place is actually not a mystery at all. Reed, like Sarah Koenig, is squarely in the center of this story and his relationship with the mercurial McLemore is captivating in its intricacy. Where Serial was built on its journalistic research and reporting but thrived when it reached moments of real humanity, S-Town is all humanity. It doesn’t take long for the mystery surrounding a possible Woodstock murder to be overtaken by the mystery surrounding the life and times of John B. In one episode, he describes himself as being “tired in a way that I can’t put into words.” He sends Reed and others long e-mails describing in well-researched detail everything from the global warming doomsday sure to come to the incessant shortcomings of his local government. By the time he and Reed cross paths, McLemore is in his late 40s and has taken on a distinctly pessimistic worldview. He describes himself as “60-70 percent” homosexual and exists with an indescribable complexity that stands in direct contrast to the simple, small-town way of his southern world. He’s a world-class clockmaker with a genius-level IQ who lives with his mother. Even in the first episode, it becomes clear that John B. Instead, what Reed and company have created in seven episodes is something completely distinct. Sorry, Serial fans, but this program won’t provide you with a new case to obsess over. The only problem is, S-Town isn’t a true crime podcast. It’s the perfect moment to have at the start of a true crime podcast - their journey through the bushes an apt analogy for the twists and turns that are sure to come. The two men walk through the property until they come to the homeowner’s prized possession: a full-scale garden maze, complete with swinging doors that can open and close passageways between the still-growing shrubs to create any number of different puzzles. McLemore had e-mailed Reed a couple of months prior about a potential murder mystery in Woodstock, a place that he had spent his entire life and often referred to as Shittown, Alabama. About halfway through the first episode of S-Town, the new hit podcast from the makers of Serial and This American Life, our host, producer Brian Reed, is walking through the sizable yard of Woodstock, Alabama resident John B.
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