S Town podcast

Anyone listen to this yet? If you haven't, you should definitely check it out. There will probably be spoilers, so listen first!

It was fucking captivating in a thousand ways. It felt a lot like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil at times, but set in a suffocatingly small town.

This type of story and this specific presentation is what podcasts can do that almost nothing else can. Maybe a TV miniseries, but even then, the great narration that is here is awkward in a visual medium. It's also harder to talk to people on the fly with camera equipment, and lots of people don't want to be seen on TV, to preserve some anonymity.

This was even better that the first season of Serial in some ways. Not as groundbreaking, but a better-told story for sure.

I've never really done a podcast with a narrative before. Would you recommend this or something else as being a good starting point?

This is as good as anything.

EDIT - oops, I made the thread with a stupid smiley face.

yea i "consumed" it rapidly over tuesday and wednesday earlier this week. great program overall - i like the changes in format compared to the first 2 seasons. arguably it was better in some ways than season 1. i like that it ended up being more "about" the characters and their stories, rather than having our narrator function as some ersatz police investigator. it's good they got most of that bit out of the way early on, i think, and allowed the show to focus on the unique people surrounding the initial hook (murder in shit town, USA).

i have to take issue with the ending, as i have done with the 2 prior seasons. i understand that they can't tie everything up in a bow, particularly because some elements may be too sensitive for national broadcast. but i wanted to see either a condensed "our characters, 2 years later" sort of treatment (e.g. did tyler end up in jail?), or a more extended rumination on the nature of what is cognizable in our interpersonal relationships generally.

as always though, the show's biggest strength, in my mind, is its ability to speak obliquely to the broader cultural zeitgeist. there has been so much arguing, discussion, hand wringing, and everything in between over the election last year, as people around the world ask themselves: how could anyone think (or vote) that way? more to the point though, we might ask, why does anybody act (or believe) the way they do? the program tries to illustrate an answer to that question, though ultimately i think it takes a somewhat agnostic stance: while we can know some things, even under the best circumstances behavior is often overdetermined, let alone all the other situations where we must labor under imperfect knowledge. these sorts of issues are what i found most compelling about the program, and i had hoped we would see a little more direct discussion to that effect in the final episode. nevertheless, i thought it was still a very enjoyable and exciting listen, and i think they are circling in on some very effective, and innovative, storytelling techniques for a nascent media format.

I didn't pay attention to any of the pre-release advertising because I didn't want to have any idea what the show was about. I'm glad, because it certainly wasn't a murder mystery. I liked this a lot more than a murder mystery, but I might have been let down that the focus shifted so drastically.

I see where you're coming from with the resolution point, but I think it's better that it didn't have one. One reason is because it would have felt artificial. The other reason is slightly more literary. The town, and more specifically the culture of the town, is really the focus of the narrative. As long as that culture continues, the story really isn't finished. John's sense that things were awful and couldn't be changed would be a little undercut if a couple of events could put a bow on things.

There were so many really amazon bits of commentary on larger society. One thing that was ubiquitous in the story was suspicion of everyone. It got frustrating at times... everyone had some theory about how everyone had bad intentions and was conspiring against them. I don't want to go too meta, but the popularity of conspiracy theories with the current president may explain why a New York billionaire resonates with the people of the town -- he sees the world as a bunch of corrupt people out to get him, too. It validates that worldview, which is perhaps more attractive than actually representing them. What's interesting is that John, who sees himself as wholly unlike the people around him, is the figure most inclined towards conspiracy and accusations of corruption, and just like the "fuck it" people, he thinks that life will always be unfair.

I think that last point is one reason why he never moved; global warming and the energy crisis will hit everywhere, so life is going to be hard either way, so suicide is about the only way out. That might sound a bit too literary, but John viewed himself that way anyhow -- it's why he gave Brian those pieces of literature as a way of understanding the town.

Mental illness is a motherfucker. BTW, did you buy the mercury poisoning angle? It seems like a great explanation to me.

is it based on a true story?