Spoiler Alert: Lots and lots of spoilers! If you haven’t listened to the S-Town podcast, and don’t want major details of the story ruined for you, please avoid reading this post. You’ve been warned. Seriously though this will totally ruin it for you so don’t read it.
Over the weekend my wife and I devoured all seven simultaneously-released episodes of S-Town, the new podcast from Serial and This American Life which launched on March 28.
The following hastily-written-and-probably-too-long blog post encapsulates my initial reaction after listening to all seven episodes straight through over three days. It’s not an episode recap; I haven’t spoken to anyone else about S-Town except for my wife; and I haven’t looked up anything about what critics or fans have said about it so far. As a result, I may get some of the details wrong, but these are some of the questions I thought about over and over again after finishing S-Town.
Why did Serial and This American Life launch the series the way they did?
I had no idea S-Town was even coming out. I may have read some rumblings about a season 3 of Serial at some point, but when my wife told me she just found out the third season had just been released, I didn’t believe her. It turns out she was right–sort of.
S-Town was apparently produced by Serial and This American Life, but was not being billed as Serial s3. Instead, S-Town is its own free-standing, seven-episode podcast. Here’s the description of S-Town from its official website:
John despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.
I subscribe to about 20 podcasts, many of them produced by NPR, so it was hard to believe a new podcast like S-Town, with public radio pedigree, would have flown under my radar.
Was this intentional?
Part of what made Serial’s first season so successful–besides that awesome Mail Chimp sponsorship–was that it came out of nowhere. Most listeners didn’t know anything about the story of Adnan Syed, they likely hadn’t heard of Sarah Koenig, and some probably hadn’t ever listened to a podcast before. Then Serial punched us in the face with some of the best storytelling you’ll find in any medium, and we were blown away.
On the heels of a great season 1, season 2 had high expectations. Some fans, including myself, even donated money to NPR/Serial to help Koenig make season 2. Without getting into detail about why season 2 was disappointing, suffice it to say it was a letdown for most fans expecting as compelling and labyrinthine a story as we got in season 1.
For those reasons, perhaps, Serial and TAL decided to keep a low profile, and release S-Town as own entity, with little fanfare and only a loose connection to Serial–allowing fans like me to go in with tempered expectations. To borrow a five-dollar word from S-Town’s subject, John Brooks McLemore, I’m guessing producers saw what happened with s2 and took a proleptic* approach to S-Town’s release to guard against such high expectations and let S-Town be judged on its own merit.
*Prolepsis: a rhetorical tool in which one anticipates possible objections in order to answer them in advance. John B uses this word in the first episode; Brian admits he had to look it up.
And why all seven episodes at once?
I go back to the failure of s2 of Serial again on this one. The reporting of the story as they learned it was what made Serial s1 so great, but s2 felt like it was poorly planned, with the cadence of new episodes changing from one week to two, as they were simultaneously updating us (and then not updating us) on the story from s1. I believe they released all seven episodes of S-Town to “prove” that the story had been fully reported on and was now a completed season we could consume all at once or spaced out however we want. This isn’t a new tactic; Netflix does this all the time with its original content. I wouldn’t be surprised if they realized Serial s3 the same way.
What was the actual timeline for the events that take place in S-Town?
From what I recall, John B first contacted Brian in 2014, they had a phone call a few months later, and eventually Brian went to visit John B in Alabama. I believe the first visit was at some point in 2015.
S1 of Serial ran from October to December 2014. Did John B contact NPR, or Serial, during that season or after? Did the reporters and/or producers involved think they might use John B’s alleged claim about an unreported murder as a season of Serial? If not, it seems strange that Brian would even bother to investigate John B’s story–though when I heard John B and Brian’s first phone call, I assumed he was providing accurate information.
And how deep into the story did Brian decide that John B’s story was podcast-worthy? And how did he decide to continue reporting after John B’s claims had been proven false? Why did he decide to continue reporting after John B died? Did he wait until he had everything he needed before deciding how to organize the information and tell the story across seven “chapters”?
I guess the question I’m really asking is…
Did Brian just get really lucky that John B–in life and in death–was as interesting as he was? Or does Brian–and the people who sign his checks–deserve credit for sticking with the story?
Like any other successful endeavor in life, it seems like this was a combination of luck and skill. Brian’s reporting of this story is tremendous, but the story of John B. McLemore was delivered on a silver platter. But give him credit for seeing that silver platter under a ratty Benjamin Moore t-shirt.
Did John B really call Faye as he was committing suicide?
Maybe Serial s1 trained me to question everything, but without a call log or audio of John B calling Faye, I’m not 100% convinced he did. Faye doesn’t really give us a reason to doubt her, except that she didn’t get in touch with the first seven people on John B’s contact list–which he hand-delivered to her for this very reason–to let them know John B had died. Was this forgetfulness or laziness on her part? Was John’s lawyer, Boozer Downs, involved somehow in some sort of cover-up?
Or is the more logical explanation simply that Faye unintentionally let the task of calling John B’s contacts fall through the cracks? Given how much John B entrusted Faye to carry out his posthumous requests, I just can’t get past this error, but the idea that it was part of a greater conspiracy to steal from him seems far-fetched.
Did Tyler steal the gold? Was there any gold? What did he tell Brian off the record in the final episode?
I kept going back and forth about whether there was any buried treasure, but if anyone knew about it besides Faye (who said it John B had gold bars wrapped in a towel in the freezer) I figured it would be Tyler. Did he take it when he went to the house to gather John B’s valuables so the Florida cousins couldn’t get to them?
When Brian asks Tyler if he ever found the buried treasure, and Tyler asks him to turn off the recorder before answering, it’s implied that he found something. I’d almost rather not know this conversation took place if I can’t know what was said!
Was Tyler a con-man? Was he feigning affection for John B, knowing he could take advantage of the situation? Did Tyler egg John B on to kill himself while he was drunk, as Rita (the Florida cousin) suggested?
I don’t think Tyler was there when John B killed himself, and I think he may even be telling the truth when he said he refused to go over to John B’s the night he killed himself, even after John B told Tyler he was going to commit suicide.
I do wonder if Tyler was fed up with John B after we learned about John B’s “church” ritual of asking Tyler to mutilate his body with tattoos, piercings, and later whippings. If I’m Tyler, I might have taken a little something for my trouble after John B had passed away, knowing I’d more than enough to earn it.
So are we just assuming John B’s depression was brought on by mercury poisoning from his unsafe practice of fire-gilding over 30+ years?
It certainly seems that way, but I can’t help but wonder if Brian asked five other doctors, he might find a few who would say John B was just depressed, and they couldn’t conclude with certainty that it was related to the mercury. Of course it doesn’t really matter except to add yet another layer of complexity to an already complex character.
How should we take the information delivered in Brian’s coda?
After we hear an excerpt from John B’s suicide note, we assume the series is over. But then Brian layers one remaining piece of information that may or may not color our view of John B, Shit Town, and really the whole story we just heard.
When Brian tells us that John B’s great-grandfather built his fortune on the backs of the neighbors he stole from, he’s implying, in my view, that John B’s expansive patch of land, his home, his garden maze, and every material possession he has–including, perhaps, some hidden gold–was ill-gotten.
Does Brian want us to think John B is a hypocrite, that for all his rants about his town’s state of dysfunction, it was people like his own great-grandfather that made it this way? Or does this answer the question of why John B, for as much as he hates Shit Town, has never left? Or why he’s driven to right all the perceived wrongs of his fellow man, including those in his town, as a way of canceling out the evil deeds of his family?
I agree with the decision to save this information for later in the story, so that it doesn’t bias us against John B and we’re free to form our own opinion of him regardless of what his family did three generations before. But I might have liked some more detail around his family history. I wonder if Brian found this information too late to add it somewhere else in the story, so he stuck it at the end.
What was S-Town? And was it good?
Genres are tricky sometimes. People starting calling Serial a “true crime” podcast, and it was, but the real-time nature of it, the way the story evolve as Sarah Koenig told it, made it something special.
Was S-Town simply a biography of an unusual man started when he was alive and finished after he died? Was it an obituary? Or was it simply an experiment in storytelling, in audio journalism?
I kind of don’t care what it was. And I don’t care that we don’t really have a resolution about John’s hidden treasure, or Tyler, or Faye, or the cousins, or even John’s mother, Mary Grace, who was supposedly flourishing once she was out of John B’s care.
Having been trained by Serial to follow a story so closely for months, only to be deprived of the closure I knew all along I wouldn’t get, I didn’t expect closure with S-Town, either. But I went along for the ride anyway, and I was glad I did.
What did you think?
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