How S-Town is upending the art of podcasting

The show is more than a podcast. It's a brilliant piece of creative nonfiction.

Producer Brian Reed and his audio storytelling maze.
(Image credit: facebook.com/stownpodcast/)

S-town, the latest offering from the makers of Serial and This American Life, is a brilliant piece of creative nonfiction. Never mind that it's a podcast; Shittown (which is the show's less-censored name) is bigger and weirder and distinctly essayistic; layered in ways most podcasts aren't, literary in ways few attempt. Indeed, S-Town expands the podcast's potential as an art form.

That S-Town is hard to classify is reflected in its marketing. Hosted by Brian Reed, a producer of This American Life, the seven-episode podcast was unusually coy about its subject matter and its relationship to Serial, Sarah Koenig's investigative podcast that became a viral juggernaut and revolutionized the form. The website announced S-Town as a podcast "about a man named John who despises his Alabama town and decides to do something about it. He asks Brian to investigate the son of a wealthy family who's allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder."

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.