Why Your Podcast Sucks: S-Town
Last updated on June 1st, 2021
The 2017 the seven-part podcast S-Town settled around its audience like the warm front that precedes a spring thunderstorm. One looks up to find the air’s too warm, too thick. Muggy enough to feel in their lungs. It’s early enough in the year that the warmth is tortuously just low enough to not push one into fully breaking a sweat and getting some relief. All you can do is sit there, embracing the discomfort until the storm comes and breaks the spell.
S-Town came out, a lot of people listened to it, and then we all had to sit in its dank humidity and process what the hell just happened without a storm in sight. The Reception section of S-Town’s Wikipedia page claims reception was “mixed” yet the best the original author could find for positive reception was half-hearted praise inside of otherwise negative reviews. This spawned a year-long game of Wikipedia telephone between three users, all trying to figure out how to not be one-sided in the page’s coverage. User Sdkb ends the conversation with a proposition that they “may get around to revising the section” in October of 2018. Nothing has changed since.
Much like the podcast-listening public, Wikipedia power users haven’t really looked back at the legacy of S-Town since the dust settled. The movie rights were sold and currently sit on a shelf. Some of the residents of Woodstock attempt to make a documentary about McLemore and suicide prevention that crowndfunded 2% of its goal just as the U.S. entered lockdown.
Well, I’ve just listened to this s-show of a s-cast twice-over, giving it every opportunity to surprise me with hidden depths I hadn’t noticed in 2017 when I was a younger, straighter person. The headline might betray how that little adventure went.
Here’s why S-Town sucks s-, actually. This article will discuss suicide, homophobia, and ableism.
“S-Town” is a coward’s name.
John B. McLemore’s pet name for Woodstock, AL of “shittown” stuck in host Brian Reed’s craw for some reason, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Serial as a company didn’t have the guts to actually name the podcast feed Shit-Town. The show attempts to have its cake and eat it too by having Reed introduce the podcast as Shit-Town, but no mainstream coverage of the show would be able to call it Shit-Town, and they knew that. Nobody at Serial or This American Life had the fortitude to put a swear in the podcast title. It’s a pointless act of rebellion against oneself to even attempt to imply the real name of S-Town is, in fact Shit-Town.
This is it: Serial will have its Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
In a way, their cowardice and non-commitment saves the show, because “Shit Town” is… not a winning title, while “S-Town” comes with a free little mystery.
Nobody knows what the hell that means and will naturally be curious. Reed deploys footage of John B. McLemore in the first chapter, listeners buy in to the spectacle of this odd Alabama man, then the title-drop happens. A masterful setup and payoff that uses the same amount of interview tape as would’ve been necessary if S-Town had lived out its original life of a This American Life segment (likely with a quirky TAL title like “A Different Kind of Woodstock”).
Read more: The 20 Best True Crime Podcasts (Beyond Serial and S-Town)
S-Town is overcooked mush.
Flash back to July 2015. Serial is about to start its second season in December, during which the production will quickly discover the most popular podcast in the world had far more people in the United States Army fandom than previously expected. The Bergdahl season becomes the Halloween 3: Season of the Witch of the Serial-verse. A not-well-received new direction in a franchise that, ironically, was originally constructed to go in new directions.
To the five people who got that reference: you’re welcome.
Alongside season two, a joint venture between Serial and This American Life has begun work, with a crack team of journalists all putting their heads together to massage a story out of a messy situation. As S-Town comes to fruition two important things happen:
- Serial 2: Buy Other People’s Interview Tapes-oogaloo confirms that even a meh season of Serial can carry season one’s momentum. 50 million downloads in four months’ worth of momentum.
- The 2016 election brings slice-of-life stories from the south back with a vengeance.
Left-leaning outlets the country over love a good story that quote-unquote humanizes people who live in a place that is considered low-class, and the South fits that bill. They either dig up somebody who breaks so many molds it boggles the mind (“check out this kid, he’s Black and gay and is campaigning for Trump!”) or they find somebody with a thick accent who dispenses nuggets of down-home wisdom.
John B. McLemore ticks both boxes, and the Serial and This American Life crew see that. This is it: Serial will have its Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
There is little reporting as to who did what specifically on S-Town, but the credits betray how many distinct cooks are in the kitchen. The first episode has two credited producers, four editors, and a fleet of staff. A stark contrast to Serial season one’s three producers and seven other people name-checked in the credits in total.
Annual video game franchises these days tend to sacrifice things like music in favor of output. Where productions that have one person with a distinct voice tend to have memorable soundtracks, the good tunes are outliers in homogenized media gauntlets like Assassin’s Creed. S-Town’s editorial voice is the Call of Duty soundtrack of podcasting. It’s there, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it five minutes after turning it off. They threw the stylistic choices of The Mystery Show, This American Life, and Serial in the teleporter from The Fly and what came out wasn’t human.
Brian Reed isn’t a reporter; he’s a character.
Setting aside the Deadspin-inspired snark for a moment: it would be disingenuous to approach S-Town from the perspective This American Life reporter and Sarah Koenig surrogate Brian Reed chased this story in hopes of shifting a metric ton of Blue Apron subscriptions. In media res he appears to have just been a doe-eyed little journo ready to host Serial: Alabama Nights, in which we learn the legal system and cops can also suck outside of Baltimore.
(Editor’s note: Rest in peace, Deadspin, and godspeed, Defector. We love you.)
Koenig got Adnan Syed and a murder case to pick apart. All he’s got is a captivating motormouth with a thick accent and opinions by the bushel. The audience quickly comes to understand what McLemore’s whole deal is because, arguably, there’s more than enough tape of him talking about himself.
I’ve listened to S-Town twice in two weeks and have poked around the internet a fair bit. All I can tell you about the guy is he’s an award-winning journalist who occasionally visits conferences, uses he/him pronouns, is monogamous, and straight (maybe?). There’s two versions of Reed at odds with each other throughout the podcast, yet they rarely reveal any actual information about him that adds to his own case. They seemingly exist just to fight.
There’s a lack of seeking outside sources and perspectives that’s so pervasive it feels… intentional.
There’s post-production Reed, with a script and gift of hindsight that allows him to project a This American Life host persona. Confident in everything, sounds like he has a stack of papers in front of him.
Then there’s boots-on-the-ground Reed. This version of Reed has a singular goal of talking and pursuing talking to people. He’s armed with the tools and practice of a seasoned journalist, yet seemingly unaware of how his actions are visible to other human beings. At one point in the story Reed walks past one of the Florida Cousins at his hotel. Time freezes as post-production Brian explains that, at the time, he has realized who the cousin was too late to initiate conversation without seeming creepy. He specifically cites a worry about coming off as stalking her.
We’re then told boots-on-the-ground Reed decides the best way to not seem like a stalker is to get the cousin’s room number from the front desk and then slip a message under the door. Y’know, the exact thing a stalker would do.
At one point he makes the comment “I don’t like to judge the way people live, and so I hadn’t the few days I was there with Mary Grace and John.” A hell of a statement to make in the middle of a highly-edited podcast in which every clip, every morsel of information provided, exists because it was judged to benefit S-Town. I don’t judge the way people live (until we’re in the edit bay).
S-Town tells the story of a queer disabled man through a straight(?), abled lens.
Thousands of words have been written on how S-Town monumentally fucked up reporting the story of a queer neurodivergent man who takes his own life. Twitch streamers who see a video game character kill themselves and stop the stream to give out suicide prevention resources and talk about what just happened do more due diligence than Reed or anyone on his team did in S-Town.
There’s a lack of seeking outside sources and perspectives that’s so pervasive it feels… intentional. Like an episode of television filmed during COVID lockdown that has a marked lack of side characters or extras due to on-set limitations. Reed crams all of McLemore’s personal experiences with sexuality into the show without onboarding anyone to act as a liaison for the queer experience. No bisexual people from similar upbringings (and there are many) are brought on to speak about being queer in the south. We instead get a kindly old gay man who has only seen a fraction of himself represented in media through Brokeback Mountain. A man who Reed only found accidentally.
If the story of John B. McLemore must have been told, there’s so much more to contextualize and discuss about him. More people could have been interviewed. Real discussions about queerness and mental health could’ve happened. S-Town could have actually said something.
Instead it’s a bland nothingburger. A journalist pokes around a small town long enough to force a vague narrative out of effectively nothing. He gets to have his big Sarah Koenig’s Best Buy phone booth moment by revealing his decision that McLemore’s mental struggles are all wrapped up in a neat bow labeled “mercury poisoning,” despite mountains of evidence to suggest there’s more at play.
This show’s approach to mental health is so backwards it’s embarrassing. Doubly so when one reminds themselves this only came out four years ago.
Read more: Ripped from the Headlines: A Review
The reveal of the B in John B. McLemore is such weak sauce they serve it at Fazoli’s.
After several years of reporting and trying to figure out how to land the S-Town plane, someone somewhere has the idea to wrap everything in a bow by having Reed recite a particularly Berendt-esque monologue to act as a button on John B. McLemore’s life. After seven hours of tomfoolery, the one thing left to do is explain what the B. in his name meant.
The fact that the B in his name is a vestigial connection to the lineage is pointless fluff in comparison to the fact Reed seemingly has testimony that McLemore’s mother literally prayed for “a genius.”
If there ever was a smoking gun on an environmental influence for what might have fucked up McLemore, a mom obsessed with having a “smart” child and zero idea what undiagnosed neurodivergencies look like is a goddamn just-fired Howitzer. Much like the pre-thunderstorm heat wave analogy at the beginning of this piece, the one thing S-Town does best is establish a concept before swiftly abandoning it for something else. S-Town begins as yet another murder mystery. It then discovers there is no murder to be found. It then continues for five more episodes, for some reason.
Neither fiction nor responsibly-reported nonfiction, S-Town now exists as this nebulous thing that few remember fondly. In short: it’s shit.
(Editor’s note 5/19/21: This piece has been updated to correct the spelling of John B. McLemore’s name.)
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