Here’s Your First Listen Of The ‘Serial’ Team’s New True Crime Podcast
Oh boy. Here we go again!
Here we go, again! The team behind Serial — Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and Ira Glass — have just released details for the first of three new spinoffs from the landmark podcast. The new series will be called S-Town, and it’s going back to the creators’ true crime roots.
S-Town, which has reportedly been in development for the past three years, will tell the story of a murder mystery in a small town in Alabama. The project kicked off when a local man brought a situation to the attention of This American Life producer Brian Reed. Reed was asked to “investigate the son of a wealthy family who [had] supposedly been bragging that he got away with murder”. “When someone else ends up dead, 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.”
Yep, sure sounds like something I would obsessively listen to while quietly resenting myself!
Reed will be the host of the new show and his colleagues all seem pretty confident in the project. This American Life host Ira Glass says the story has a lot of “unexpected turns” and “has this feeling and mood that’s different from anything else we’ve done”. “I don’t think people have heard a show like this,” he said.
Julie Snyder has described the series as “arty” and “novelistic”, and Sarah Koenig agrees. “It is weird, it is beautiful, it has a plot that goes in different directions that I never saw coming,” she said in her recorded introduction to the show.
We now have a three-minute preview to the story, spoken by Reed, in which he articulately lays out the method for restoring antique clocks before an extremely Southern guy reveals that the S in the podcast’s title stands for ‘shit’. Classic.
S-Town will be released all at once on March 28. It’s a funny approach considering the carefully staggered hype and intrigue Serial garnered in its first season. I guess binge-listening podcasts are a thing now. You can subscribe here.