It feels like S-Town knows my own memories too well.īrian Reed, the narrator and investigator who drives much of the podcast's action is an interloper he is a New Yorker working his way into a community that both welcomes him and is consistently suspicious of him. Not intrusive in the sense that, as many have noted, it takes what is probably too close a look into a dead man's personal life. The portrait that S-Town paints, not just of the people but of the place itself, is so lively and so honest that it feels almost intrusive. Bibb County, where S-Town takes place, was my throughway between home and school. At 18, I left for college in a much smaller but much more politically progressive town further north, near Birmingham. I grew up 3 hours south of Woodstock, in the slightly larger town of Enterprise. The landscape laid out in S-Town's seven episodes is one that I'm intimately familiar with. Somethin' has absolutely happened in this town… and I about had enough of the things that go down in Shit Town." It had been years since I'd heard an accent from my home state that thick. I was on a crowded subway car at 8 in the morning, and I let out the smallest sob. laughs and says, "That awkward moment of silence!" The word "silence" is spoken long and languished: "Sah-lunce." This moment is when listeners first hear John B. The first time Reed and McLemore speak over the phone after months of emails, John B.
![serial podcast clockmaker serial podcast clockmaker](https://www.bswusa.com/Images/Product_Images/ese_lx520.jpg)
By the second episode, these two cases are more or less forgotten.
![serial podcast clockmaker serial podcast clockmaker](https://blainevoyage.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/img_2033.jpg)
John B.'s email starts: "I live in a crummy little shit town in Alabama, called Woodstock." Here, S-Town begins a long and complex narrative with a mystery: a sexual abuse case and a murder covered in up by the Bibb County sheriff's department (the murder of a young boy who John B. McLemore emails Brian Reed, a producer at the podcast This American Life.
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S-Town begins: "An antique clock maker contacted me… and asked me to solve a murder." In late 2012, a man in Alabama named John B. (This essay contains major spoilers for the podcast S-Town )