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 currently in the works. (Per a THR conversation with 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, with Spotlight/The Cobbler director 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.
