The 'new Serial' podcast has landed. So, does it live up to the hype?

When This American Life released their first ever spin-off series Serial back in 2014, it was hailed as a new era in podcasting. This would be the podcast that changed podcasts.

Serial ranked number one on iTunes even before its debut, lead iTunes rankings for over three months and was the fastest podcast ever to reach 5 million downloads.

In April 2015, Serial won a Peabody Award for its innovative telling of a long-form nonfiction story. It has since been hailed by many as the greatest podcast ever created.

So when the Serial and This American Life team got together and created another, newer, younger sibling to add to their wildly successful podcast portfolio, S-Town was born.

Don’t stress, this won’t be a place of spoilers – we will carefully dodge divulging details of the story arc while still giving you a glimpse of what the story entails.

So does it live up to the hype?

In a word, yes.

The hype was worth it. Hosted by This American Life Senior Producer Brian Reed, it’s a beautifully put-together story that will have you crying in a single moment before being smacked in the face with a twist faster than you can wipe your tears away.

So what’s it all about?

It starts with a man named John who despises his Alabama town of Woodstock and decides to do something about it. S-Town, of course, being Sh*t Town – John’s preferred name for his troubled town. He asks host Brian Reed to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, and the search for the truth leads to a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.

The synopsis is vague, because, well, it has to be. On first impressions it sounds like the current flavour of the month: a deep-dive into true crime that’s creepy and sad but fascinating.

But it’s not that. It’s much more than that.

At the risk of bringing everything back to Trump’s America, the timing of the podcast is poignant. Christopher Hooton wrote for The Independent this week that the team “couldn’t have known when its story began three years ago that it would come to fruition with perfect timing.”

A post shared by S-Town Podcast (@stownpodcast) on Mar 13, 2017 at 7:14pm PDT

Since Trump’s election, much as been made of the echo-chamber. Analysis of his election win has centred on the divide in the US between the politically driven, Twitter-obsessed liberals and the small-town conservatives. The people of John’s Alabama town aren’t politically engaged nor are they progressive. To give you a better picture, despite the Supreme Court ordering otherwise, this is the kind of town that still refuses to issue marriage certificates to same-sex marriages. A simple thing like being gay doesn’t really fly in Sh*t Town.

Nicholas Quah wrote for Vulture upon its release there’s “some validity” to the connections being made between S-Town and Trump’s America, writing “there are elements of suffering and resentment in rural American towns long forgotten by the march of progress”.

So how do others find it?

Aja Romano wrote for Vox this week the podcast is “brilliant, complicated, frequently troubling, and often painfully beautiful”. Romano did, however, raise questions about privacy and was troubled by the thought that some of the main players in the story perhaps couldn’t “consent” to their story “being shared with the world”.

Why Monique Bowley thinks you should be listening to S-Town.

Amanda Hess wrote for the New York Times that a core charm of the podcast is its break-away from a saturated market of stories about “a journalist trying to solve a murder with just a microphone and a little elbow grease”.

“Some Serial fans may be disappointed to learn that the crew’s latest offering is not a straightforward whodunit,” she wrote. “They shouldn’t be. S-Town turns out to be much more interesting than that.”

Nicholas Quah of Vulture believes that S-Town deserves the same response, and praise, that’s been given to Serial.

“It’s one of the most sincerely human things I’ve ever listened to, a pleasure multiplied by its grand scope of ambition,” he wrote.

And us? It’s a different kind of gripping with the characteristic brushstrokes of This American Life’s brilliant storytelling and faultless editing.

Simply, it’s made well. It’s not hard to listen to. It makes you think about the world without thinking too hard. It makes you feel a kind of empathy for faces you’ve never seen and perhaps never will.

It’s brilliant audio. And it’s absolutely worth your time.