Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

The lame scheduling and half-updates stuff would make more sense if this had been some normal podcast not a cultural phenomenon that took almost a year off between seasons

I can't even with this show, it's like they're trying to lose fans.

They could have said two weeks ago that the next episode will be the finale to build up a little anticipation

there are a bunch of things i know Are Bad abt this - weird decision to use some random external guy's research, extra-weirdness of this decision in light of hearing the whole thing & so knowing it didn't contain fascinating bombshell revelations, inexplicable failure to internalise universal critique that they shd finish their research before broadcasting, lapsing into missed episodes &c&c&c - but it is still just super interesting i think? any comparison w s1 just feels kinda thankless & pointless & doomed to useless negativity but it still so meaningfully vindicates the thesis that exploring anything in depth pays dividends, i think; the last few episodes of just heavy & extended vignettes from a war i don't hear about, this whole culture-dynamic portrait of what the military is like, how the veins of its philosophy stretch out & thin in real situations, the crazy infrastructure of military divisions & hierarchies & how doomed & misguided & separate from intentionality the activity is. the route this show took like as a brand is wild & seems kinda weirdly pathologically self-sabotaging & confused but that's pretty separate from what its however-many hours of actual radio time are like, i think. i guess it kinda didn't really satisfy a maybe reasonable expectation of twists & turns or reveals & resolutions but it's still super engaging to get lost in i think.

Yeah, I liked this way more at the end than when the season started out.

I felt differently - I got so tangled up trying to parse the complexities of the story they were telling that I finished with the firm conclusion that stories like this make lousy radio/podcast, that they're best served by longform journalism. I mean you can tell a story in many different ways, but three things audio journalism is amazing at are (1) putting you "inside" a place, instantly; (2) giving you the vivid sense of a person; (3) creating (almost bewilderingly instant) empathy between the listener and the subject. S2 rarely made use of these strengths.

my main memory of s1 - & it is so funny to either skim this thread or talk to somebody about s1 & realise that, beyond knowing that it somehow involved competing theories on cellphone tower functioning, i have otherwise shed all my actual, detailed memory of s1 - is the satisfaction of moving beyond well-organised & persuasive longform-journalism-style understanding & into the sort of dizzy nihilistic blankness of not knowing, a kind of herzog-colbertian ecstatic truthiness that reduced the value of facts & left you swimming in something else dislocated. i think that it's true that it wasn't any of the things you mention, which s1 was, but both feeling lost in the complexities, or distant from the ostensible narrative, have their own cute content-resembles-form dimensions with reference to this specific weird situation, i think. it doesn't have to be a credit to the show that somehow being able to spin the dial & land on some five-years-out-of-the-military guy's rued memories delivered through telephone compression would be affecting, whether or not they add up to anything. so heavy to be reminded at the end that this was about twenty year olds.

yeah; this season was spotty, but I thought the finale was pretty good

i still have one ep left, but this definitely got more interesting towards the end. when kim first turned up, i wondered why she was bowe's emergency contact and not his parents, so i was interested in the background stuff of his life - it wasn't what i was expecting at all. some of his social anxiety and his complete black and white thinking about right and wrong initially came off as a bit ASD, but the schizoid-type personality disorder thing made a lot of sense. the stuff about how he even ended up in the army - the bureaucratic fuckups - was just as interesting.

but in contrast to that - his psych reports after he was released basically surmised that in order to survive 5 yrs in captivity he had to be very mentally sound, that there was no way he would have survived otherwise. how does that fit with his mental illness diagnosis?

this portrait of a young man who grew up isolated and had some very grand delusions of what he would accomplish in life (hey, when i was 14-15 i actually believed i was smart enough to be an astronaut or a doctor or whatever i wanted, so i can empathize), who didn't really fit in anywhere and couldn't understand the motivations of the people around him, who finds himself a POW for five excruciating years as a result - i just find that incredibly sad. maybe especially bc he seems so self-aware now, understands that it was mostly bullshit.

I still couldn't get much involved with the personal trials and travails of BB but I did find the reactions in the final episode fascinating because it's clear that the army's normal reaction to things like what BB did where it doesn't result in the person being held prisoner for 5 years and exchanged for Taliban POWs is... normal ("well anyone walking off base must be pretty crazy let's evaluate and discharge them.") And I guess this might end up being the army's reaction here too ultimately, but obv it's not before BB gets turned into an ugly right wing talking point and basically eviscerated by his fellow GIs publicly and repeatedly for what ultimately amounts to youthful fantasy.

there are a bunch of things i know Are Bad abt this - weird decision to use some random external guy's research, extra-weirdness of this decision in light of hearing the whole thing & so knowing it didn't contain fascinating bombshell revelations, inexplicable failure to internalise universal critique that they shd finish their research before broadcasting, lapsing into missed episodes &c&c&c - but it is still just super interesting i think? any comparison w s1 just feels kinda thankless & pointless & doomed to useless negativity but it still so meaningfully vindicates the thesis that exploring anything in depth pays dividends, i think; the last few episodes of just heavy & extended vignettes from a war i don't hear about, this whole culture-dynamic portrait of what the military is like, how the veins of its philosophy stretch out & thin in real situations, the crazy infrastructure of military divisions & hierarchies & how doomed & misguided & separate from intentionality the activity is. the route this show took like as a brand is wild & seems kinda weirdly pathologically self-sabotaging & confused but that's pretty separate from what its however-many hours of actual radio time are like, i think. i guess it kinda didn't really satisfy a maybe reasonable expectation of twists & turns or reveals & resolutions but it's still super engaging to get lost in i think.

― 1st Amendment absolutist in favor of the unltd publication of sextapes (schlump), Saturday, April 2, 2016 1:40 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^This

This season wound up not being so much about a "protagonist" and whether he was "crazy, guilty or w/e" but about a whole ecosystem of government and how when you (basically) throw a rogue element into that ecosystem it causes some unforeseen results, which I think is what turned people off - just a very different thing to S1.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-adnan-syed-new-trial-20160630-story.html

dude

yeah just saw that. Feel like it's gonna be a real shitshow tbqh. I probably just shouldn't follow it. If he gets out, so be it. He served a long time.

I listened to the new Serial spin-off show "Shit Town"

a few gestures toward mystery, but mostly a character study set in among a lot of terrible people

Yeah i am listening to ep 2 now

Kinda hate these aimless gumshoe things so i dont really care that much about the "mystery," but the people are kinda interesting so i'll keep going.

Listen past ep 2. It's a whole other story and I am on board

1 episode left I'm finishing this tonight. I love it.

This is no question the best short run podcast I've ever listened to.

(S-Town, not Serial...in case there's confusion in the future.)

Agree. Great storytelling

Here's an album of the maze in its infancy

http://m.imgur.com/a/EIVGd#U29vSxh

So beautiful!

Jeans hugging thighs love

Impossible to listen to John McLemore talk without visualizing Buddy Garrity.

??? Texas and Alabama accents are pretty different.

Compu possibly non-American?

Texas + Southern accents tend get lumped together by non Americans because of the sound of the drawl; difference in regional cadence, speech pattern etc is something learned over time (speaking for myself anyway)

But yeah, i dont hear Buddy in John B myself

I thought this was pretty good but jaymc posted this elsewhere and I have trouble arguing with a lot of it: http://www.vox.com/culture/2017/3/30/15084224/s-town-review-controversial-podcast-privacy

meaning I thought the podcast was pretty good but I also had qualms about a lot of the stuff discussed in that article

I read it too - but part of me wonders if this hadnt come so soon after Missing Richard Simmons, would they call out S-Town like this? Not that its not valid but the timing does seem worth noting

(Missing Richard Simmons was some real gonzo nonsense, a lot of line- crossing & non-journalistic journalism that frankly pissed me off.)

I'd be interested to see S-Town answer those questions, though. I did wonder in particular about the Oren episode... but if Oren reached out himself and wanted to tell his story, *is* that problematic? Does it fall under the umbrella of "outing" John? Asking out loud, bc I dont know.

And again, I'm aware of my bias as a fan of the show.

In short, all news reporting on any dead person who ever lived is invasive according to this Vox author.

Excuse me while I retrieve my eyeballs. They rolled straight to the back of my head.

Well that too. Hot takes are a dime a dozen

I think part of the difference between S-Town and Missing Richard Simmons is the empathy of the hosts and storytellers.

Dan Taberski seems like a person genuinely more interested in sensationalism who got shamed for it and by the end of his podcast's run shed some crocodile tears.

Brian Reed very clearly cared about John B, and by extension, many of John B's family and friends. And even if part of it was an act, I think the story was told with the utmost respect for its subject. Celebrity deaths should be covered so tenderly.

That Vox article is fair, though I do think John B seemed to want to share at least some aspects of himself with the world. And affection on the part of the reporter is no guard against exploitation, necessarily. I'd be interested to know if Reed and McElmore signed any formal agreements about what it was okay to reveal.

I agree with the Vox reporter that Reed's justification for sharing the story about one of John's relationships was...convenient. It's sticky as a listener, because the Oren episode was the best one, completely heartbreaking. Also the most intrusive.

In short, all news reporting on any dead person who ever lived is invasive according to this Vox author.

i mean ... it is?

i think you have to justify revealing all of someone's secrets without permission after they're dead and i don't know that s town did

One literary antecedent not explicitly mentioned in the podcast is Borges. The maze! So Borgesian! But then, that brings up the whole question of ethics...the form of the podcast encourages the listener to read John's story as a novel, and it's not.

Borges would have loved the clock-fixing too. Excuse me, the horology.

John B, in life, seemed periodically filled with despair about his legacy, or the lack thereof. I wonder if that's part of how Reed justifies exposing his private life, because it does really make you admire him, among other feelings.

I

i get a lot of the points in that vox article but it felt like john b. sort of wanted his story told - when brian reed starts to actually investigate the so-called murder, he notices that john b. isn't all that interested in finding out what actually happened. and that vox writer makes some presumptions himself, like the 'latent homoerotic bond' between john b. and tyler. just because john b. considered himself queer, it doesn't mean all his close male relationships were some form of that queerness; a yearning for an intimate connection with someone else isn't necessarily romantic or sexual.

I wonder if the whole thing, being on the show, dying as part of the show, was planned by John

It feels like something he might orchestrate

horseshoe otm re Borges & the maze & clicks

Also how great is that Zombies song, I have loved it for so long & it just turned into a new beautiful thing with this show

I wonder if the whole thing, being on the show, dying as part of the show, was planned by John

Too many moving parts. What if Brian had never responded to the letter? The only thing that made him do so was seeing news of a cop being sentenced for what John B had claimed was going on.

But once the correspondence happened....

Fair point.

xps yeah, exactly! he seemed to have a sort of performative personality (idk if that's the right way to describe it)

i still don't get why he didn't have any kind of will

Knowing him he probably coded it into his manifesto ir something

so dope

https://i.imgur.com/AqNdXcP.jpg