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PORTSIDE CULTURE

APPLETV+ IS REPORTEDLY “EYING” A TV VERSION OF ANCIENT PODCAST
HIT S-TOWN  
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William Hughes
September 14, 2024
AV Club [[link removed]]

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_ Producer Brian Reed says he's working with AppleTV+ on a TV
adaptation of 2017 podcast phenomenon S-Town _

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We’ve been sitting here for a few minutes now, staring at the blank
page, trying to explain how incredibly weird it feels to hear that
there’s a TV adaptation of Peabody-winning investigative journalism
podcast _S-Town
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in the works. (Per a _THR _conversation
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host, reporter, and producer Brian Reed, who’s reportedly talking
about the show with AppleTV+.) It’s not just that _S-Town _is old,
although it is, by the standards of online content: It arrived back in
2017, when it unashamedly piggybacked off the phenomenon that was the
first season of _Serial _to become one of the biggest media
phenomena of the year. But it’s not just the years (honey), it’s
the mileage: The 7-episode series, which attempted to sketch both the
life and death of small-town eccentric John B. McLemore, feels like it
was produced by some whole other online culture than the one we live
in now. Whole genres and forms in true-crime storytelling have been
planted, blossomed, and then brutally harvested in the seven years
since the show scored 10 million downloads within the first four days
of release; it feels like a thing that happened to a whole other
internet.

Worth noting that this isn’t the first time that Reed has been
involved in an adaptation of the series; he’d previously been
attached to a film adaptation
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with _Spotlight_
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Cobbler
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Tom McCarthy reportedly in talks to direct. (Yes, we know it’s old
hat to make fun of Tom McCarthy for his Adam Sandler fantasy comedy
about magic shoes; what can we say, we’re suddenly in a very
mid-2010s mood.) However, those plans ended up getting disrupted when
the administrator of McLemore’s estate launched a lawsuit against
Serial Productions, claiming a violation of personality rights on
behalf of McLemore—whose death by suicide in 2015 was a major part
of the show’s narrative. The suit was eventually settled in 2020, at
which point producer Julie Snyder expressed a desire to restart
development on potential adaptations.

All of which brings us back to 2024, an absolute eternity in the world
of podcasting. And we have to ask, genuinely: Is there room for
something like this, now? _Serial_, and then _S-Town _(which was
created by producers of _Serial _and _This American Life_) kicked
off a massive boom in true-crime podcasting, even as its creators
attempted to thread the line between voyeurism and journalism with
mixed degrees of success. (If you’ve never listened to the third
season of _Serial_, which can be read, in part, as an attempt to
correct many of the storytelling sins the show itself helped
popularize, by focusing on broken systems instead of sensational
cases, it’s worth a listen.) _S-Town_, by putting the life of one
unhappy man in a small town under the microscope, was often funny,
fascinating, and heartbreaking. (We think, anyway; it’s been seven
long years.) It was also sometimes invasive, and frequently
uncomfortable. It feels like a relic of another way of approaching
these kinds of stories; we have no idea what a TV version would look
like now—but will presumably soon be finding out.

* s-town
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* podcasts
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* Alabama
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* the South
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* Southern Workers
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