The creators of the popular true crime podcast Serial released the highly-anticipated seven-episode audio documentary S-Town on Tuesday. Hosted by This American Life's Brian Reed and Serial's Sarah Koenig, the podcast follows Reed as he befriends a man who claims to have information about an unsolved murder in a rural Alabama town. "While [S-Town] boasts the seamless audio production of Serial, it's tonally a very different beast — equal parts Twin Peaks-style quirky-small-town portraiture and the unsettling Southern Gothic of Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood," writes Quartz.
As the podcast's executive producer, Julie Snyder, told Wired: "With Serial, we were experimenting with using television as a model. With this one, we looked to novels. In a novel, you're entering into a hermetic world. That's what we were trying to do, that we hadn't yet done with a podcast: where you can enter their specific world, and you don't know really know what it's about or where it's going, but hopefully you're compelled to stay in it the whole time."
The podcast took three years to make and Vulture raves it is "unnaturally sophisticated." The entire series can be streamed here.
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