"S-Town" podcast from the Serial/TAL gang--anyone listening?

Cafe Society
61

I thought it was ultimately kind of disappointing. The first two episodes were interesting, but it went downhill after that.

I have been listening to podcasts for 10+ years now, and there seems to be a huge surge of new podcasts happening now. Of course, Serial really brought podcasts into mainstream attention a couple of years ago (and S-town is a direct descendant of Serial). Now it seems like almost everyone in the news media or in Hollywood has their own podcast. So I think a story like this gets its own podcast not because it was a story that needed or ‘deserved’ to be heard (IMO), but because people will podcast about any mundane thing now. They view everything as ‘content.’ As someone who listens to a lot of podcasts, it’s great to have a lot of choices, but it feels like the signal-to-noise ratio is getting lower.

62

The most interesting part of the entire season to me was

the revelation that presumably the John B. that Reed had known was not primarily the same person others had known & remembered. Reed didn’t meet him till he was in the midst of his downward spiral (due either to mercury poisoning or just manic depression). Prior to this revelation, I was having trouble reconciling why everyone in town seemed to admire him so much. Sure, he was an OK guy, but also a little pretentious & preachy (and maybe full of shit?). Then we find out everything we have heard from John was as he was approaching rock bottom.