Murders, treasures, tattoos and watches

Detective radio show S-Town is the most successful and exciting American podcast of the year

At the end of March, a new podcast from the creators of the radio show This American Life and the podcast Serial was released. In 4 days, S-Town was downloaded 10 million times. Meduza explains why a seven-hour detective story that begins with a murder in the remote American town of Woodstock in Alabama is likely to be the most important thing to happen to radio in 2017.

What is the S-Town podcast about?

S-Town begins like this: This American Life radio show producer John B. McLemore, a resident of the small town of Woodstock, Alabama, keeps calling and texting him. He talks about how bad everything is in Woodstock: the name S-Town comes from the word Shittown, which is what McLemore calls his place of residence, which, according to him, is “in absolute shithole.” The police are corrupt, there are numerous cases of child abuse, and on top of that, the 20-year-old son of a local oligarch is walking around town, telling everyone how he beat a guy to death in a fight. And everyone knows about it, and they do nothing about it. McLemore asks radio host Brian Reed to come and look into the matter.

Over the course of the phone conversations that make up the entire first episode of the podcast, Reed and McLemore mysteriously become close. McLemore turns out to be quite an educated and interesting conversationalist, who also has a good understanding of horology , builds sundials, repairs antique ones, and is generally obsessed with time, global warming, and economic problems. McLemore is very lonely in Woodstock, and he cannot leave because he is caring for his mother. He despises his stupid, tattooed, racist neighbors (in McLemore's opinion, tattoos are the main sign of stupidity).

After some time, Brian Reed comes to Woodstock and meets McLemore. And then things start to get weird. When the journalist tries to find any information about the alleged murder, everyone advises him to talk to the killer himself - they say he will be happy to tell about it. McLemore completely loses interest in the investigation, drunk shows Brian a huge number of tattoos on his own body and generally behaves somehow suspiciously.

In the first episode, Reed tells how his girlfriend convinced him to close all posts on his Facebook, especially their joint photos: the journalist's future wife believed that if they saw him dating a black woman in Alabama, he could get into trouble. Once in Woodstock, Reed quickly realizes that the girl was right.

Starting out as a traditional investigative journalism, by the end of the second series S-Town completely changes the plot direction and narrative style.

It's not a big spoiler to say that there was no murder - by the time we find out about it, it no longer matters: a new, very recent corpse appears in the plot - and Reed gets down to business.

Halfway through the seven-hour story, everything that's happening begins to resemble an adventure novel, in which several people, including Reed, are trying to find deposits of gold, which either was, or is, or was invented, using strange clues, geographic coordinates, and other randomly left evidence. But at some point, even this ceases to matter.

Towards the end it will seem that this is a detective story again. And the corpse did not appear by chance. And the suspects are good, and the positive heroes are villains. And that this - in the end - also means almost nothing.

Podcasts are the new TV series

Brian Reed began working on S-Town a year before the release of the first season of the Serial podcast, which made waves in 2014. The multi-part investigation of a true crime gathered millions of listeners at the time. S-Town, which was released at the end of March, was downloaded 10 million times on the first day.

One of the creators of S-Town, Sarah Koenig, is called the person who changed the way listeners think about podcasts: it was she who, in Serial, investigated the case of Adnan Syed, who received a life sentence for the murder of his ex-girlfriend and claimed that he did not commit the crime.

Serial was listened to in one breath, each episode was discussed as a new episode of some Game of Thrones; in total, the podcast was downloaded about a hundred million times. Nothing like this had ever happened with podcasts before - and it doesn’t happen now (although they are very popular in America). What is important is that the podcast led to real consequences: a year after the podcast was released, Syed was allowed to appeal. The second season was dedicated to the case of American soldier Bowie Bergdall, who was exchanged from Taliban captivity for Guantanamo prisoners in 2014; it was said that the sergeant had deserted the army, and in captivity he lived freely and sympathized with the Taliban.

The March premiere of S-Town was announced back in November, but all the details were kept a closely guarded secret. The only thing known was a mysterious murder and treasure hunters.

“Whereas Serial was an experiment that was looking at television, S-Town was an experiment that was looking at literature,” S-Town producer Snyder told Wired. Wired compares the podcast to the works of Flannery O’Connor, which are similar to the stories in the “eerie sense of foreboding” collection that McLemore gives Reed to read in the first episode.

In fact, by the last, 7th episode, the usual investigation turns into a great American novel like Hanya Yanagihara's "A Little Life", which recently caused a huge amount of controversy in Russia. This is a conversation about childhood trauma, sexual abuse, the hopeless cruelty of one-story America, the theory and philosophy of time, antique clocks, love that never happened and the impossibility of love in general, loneliness; about same-sex relationships and the frustration that comes from their impossibility.

However, unlike "A Little Life", which was accused of having a certain flatness of characters, in S-Town everything is very complicated. Those who were not accused of murder seem to be ideal candidates for this role - even those whom the narrator does not suspect look like killers. Everyone lies, everyone is shady, no one inspires the slightest trust, everyone is in absolute shit, but digging through it turns out to be very interesting.

Ekaterina Krongauz