Serial - the podcast *spoilers*

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

Oh man <3

??? Texas and Alabama accents are pretty different.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Sunday, April 2, 2017 5:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They're definitely different accents, but for whatever reason John's accent sounds exactly like Buddy's to my ears, and shocked I'm the only one! Maybe it's just how he'd accentuate certain things when he talked, idk. I guess I don't hear John's accent as being particularly thick/Alabamian, just based on talking to family members who live down in Abbeville, AL?

Either way, listened to both S-Town and MRS over the weekend. Although it was nice to hear Taberski say more than a few times that his ultimate goal was to get clarification that RS is indeed just kickin' back and not being held against his will, there's still a strong whiff of hijinx and pushiness that S-town, despite all the hijinx and pushiness, does not. Probably helps to have a massive team + resources behind S-Town as a follow-up to Serial.a

I listened to Taberski's interview on Katie Couric's podcast last week and what he portrays as a friendship with Richard in the MRS podcast he admits to Katie began when he approached Simmons about making a documentary about him, which Richard rebuffed, only for Taberski to keep hanging around his sphere for another six months before Simmons finally agreed to it. That knowledge further tainted the whole experience for me, because Taberski never disclosed the actual relationship to Simmons in his own story.

The way I look at it now is that Taberski was among other things also a field producer for the Daily Show, so I think that does go a long way to explaining his approach to this show: what's going to be entertaining to listen to, where is the tension going to come from, and explains all that weird 'she's a witch!!!' shit with the masseuse and the housekeeper and why he was rolling up to Simmons' house with hardly any lead-up.

I can hear Buddy Garrity, the drawl and points of emphasis are similar but that deep south is a little more round.

TBH, I'm from urban and north Texas so rural/west Texas is pretty foreign to me, accent-wise.

Struggling with the first episode, I find that combo of obsessiveness/awkwardness uncomfortable.

listening to this now - enjoying it even if npr voices are a p hard listen.

spoiler: the whole world is a shit town

I want a spin-off podcast just about clocks and John's clock friends

One of my friends in Alabama went on a little expedition in Woodstock last Saturday. He found the "Little Caeser's pizza hut" at the origin of the story, and he also found John B's burial plot.

It makes me sad how modest this headstone is. Tyler made it because no one else would pay for one.

http://i.imgur.com/2xE4aua.jpg

He did such a nice job with it for what it is.

radio 4 has been jumping into this real-life whodunit thing hard. for those of this bent you might enjoy

Intrigue: Murder In the Lucky Holiday Hotel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04sj2pt

Each ep about 20 mins. An involved, heavily produced account of complex skulduggery in China

and this:

High-Street Abduction
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04qj6g1

Each ep about 8 mins, a quick-hit, extremely straightforward procedural but still had me on the edge of my fucking seat

S Town is beautiful, especially the last two epiisodes.

I don't think it's more invasive than any other biographical portrait. The strength of the show is that it doesn't push John B's story into one narrative -- about sexual repression, mental health, rural helplessness -- but represents all of these things just as much as the narrative demands.

Or as much as the material demands. I'm tired, but the point is the show seemed genuinely interested in understanding him.

Yeah but where is the gold?

Well, he's getting a new trial:

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/29/598001941/serial-subject-adnan-syed-deserves-a-new-trial-appeals-court-rules

I don't know how the fuck you try a case that old at this point.

wow it's nuts that Season 2 of this podcast finished up two fucking years ago (Mar 31, 2016)

Reading the court ruling, it's basically what they said in episode 1. Nuts, and also kinda infuriating, that it's taken two years to get to this point, then.

Yup, it's all the Asia MacLain alibi. And I stand by what I said to begin with:
--

Finally listened to the first ep, and a thing that slightly irks me about the setup is that it's pretty much down to two possibilities right away: he did it, or Jay for some reason made up a very elaborate lie. And the second option in turn doesn't present a lot of possibilities either: Jay did it himself, he's covering up for someone else who did it, he's a psycopath who wanted to get Adnan for some reason, he's just a psycopath period. I thought starting with tracking down the library alibi was sort of a weird thing to start with, I'd start with "WHY THE FUCK WOULD JAY SAY THAT IF IT'S NOT TRUE?" Whereas the library alibi is almost certain not to be a slam dunk no matter what she finds out.

So I hope the show gets to that before this Ep 8 "The Deal With Jay" or else I'm just gonna have to skip ahead.

― my jaw left (Hurting 2), Thursday, November 20, 2014 6:35 PM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And the dissent in the opinion agrees that the alibi would hardly be a slam dunk

My memories of the podcast are a bit hazy, but if I recall the show did a pretty good job poking holes in the prosecution's timeline, and Asia MacLain's testimony would further dismantle that. But even if you throw out the prosecution's entire timeline that doesn't really exonerate Adnan, or even significantly dent the case against him. It just means he didn't do it during the sort of arbitrary window the prosecution argued he did it.

RE: Jay, I always thought he was pretty clear that his initial inconsistencies with LE was due to the fact that he was a drug dealer and didn't want to incriminate himself.

If I've learned anything from watching several seasons of Forensic Files, it's always the ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. Jay is the ultimate red herring.

Statistics back that up. It really is usually a partner or ex and jealousy is a common motive.

I felt like Serial should have subtitles: But hey there was a black kid!

Subtitled

depressingly otm

series 1 hasn't aged well for me. it feels like an argument for the primacy of a certain kind storytelling, the kind that emanates from a zone of authoritative white NPR elites, even when it's about working class kids of color. the chutzpah required to think that well, i'm a great radio producer, therefore i'm just going to give a good ol' logistical beatdown to this case by identifying the black kid with a shaky alibi. it's been years since i've listened and i know it's more nuanced than that, but i'm talking about retrospect, what i take away from it, the truths that appear to have survived my sieve-like memory, and that's what they are for me

i haaaaated the amateur investigation aspect so much i stopped about 3/4 of the way through. it was so manipulative and so far from the type of true crime that engages me. it was producing & storytelling over intellectual rigor/honesty, like Looking for Richard Simmons. Emotions have primacy over logic. It was gross to me. And even though I understood the logistics, that the victim’s family did not want to be involved, there was something so unsettling to me about coming at this crime from an angle that blocked her out almost completely. the narrative is Adnan & Jay, she has no voice at all. and that bothered me. it felt dishonest.

Yeah. I liked it at the time but it seems like they left a lot out in retrospect, and I never really considered how traumatic it must have been for the victim's family to live through Serial mania (followed by Serial parody mania, etc.)

Speaking of parody, but did anyone hear 'A Most Fatal Murder'? That hits the Serial style pretty amazingly.

I liked the onion podcast—it seemed as much aimed all the follow up shows like Up and Vanished

Tracer and VG totally on the mark there and I felt similarly at the time. Kinda kept that to myself cuz honestly it was, uh, NOT a popular opinion.

Yeah, looking forward to some more shitty, possibly irresponsible Nancy Drew detective work from Koenig and crew. Hate this thing.

― circa1916, Thursday, December 10, 2015 4:42 PM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok at least i made a note here

ok so I guess i need to cop to revisionist history, at the time I guess I liked it more than I remember & my misgivings grew over time

:/

difficult-difficult lemon-difficult (VegemiteGrrl)
Posted: December 18, 2014 at 7:39:30 PM
my overall takeaway from this was

1 -- it was a cool podcast, v engaging and I enjoyed listening to it.

2 -- I had a hard time with how hard they leaned on storytelling when they didn't have any investigative angles to cover. so many useless pointless cul d sacs that I could have done without. and i could live without SK's livejournaling re: Adnan. But that's just me. I kinda wanted a liiiiitle bit more objectivity somehow? it just felt a bit too creepily invested

3--- my personal unsubstantiated theory is that I have no idea who killed Hae. But Jay and Adnan seem both to be covering up something else that they were doing together that day, that they don't want incriminate themselves or someone else in. Something that perhaps did not even involve Hae's murder. Whether's w33d or whatever else. But the inconsistencies in both their stories just seem to be pointing people's noses in weird, unusual directions that feel like some kind of awkward subterfuge. Like, I don't think that they worked out a story together, but they just both really want the focus not to be on x whatever x is.

4---I don't hate the serial killer theory. And I don't blame them for at least pursuing it as something to rule out. Granted Hae's murder was not tied to a burglary and seems a bit too convenient to fit this other dude's mo, and if it was this guy then it just underlines even more like what the everloving fuck were jay and adnan even doing/saying/talking about this whole fucking time. But a helicopter view of this is refreshing! it gets too myopic to just be picking over phone records all the time and talking to the same 5 people you've talked to 20 times...a fresh perspective can show you what the case is not, and bring new details forward that weren't being looked at before. And some kind of dna testing at least helps with scientific evidence which, I mean the fact that they hardly have anything really puts this case in the shitter investigatively, if we're going to be really real here.

But yeah. This was an engaging exercise. I feel v sad for the irl people involved, ie adnan's family and hae's family and generally having to deal with all the nerd-detectives who are going to want to solve this for them

Yeah whole last batch of posts from everyone and especially Tracer and VG OTM. Part of why it was so enraging in the end is that it WAS so engrossing, but it turned out to be a case where the emotional manipulation of "storytelling" has real life consequences that the show wasn't really prepared to deal with responsibly. Ultimately it was very tabloid in that way, but with the arrogance of liberal arts-educated people who took writing classes and think they are above doing tabloidy things, that the mere fact of their sophisticated "storytelling" doesn't merely absolve them of moral responsibility, but makes it unthinkable that moral responsibility could even be an issue, since after all they speak about everything in measured, careful tones and are always "considering both sides" of things.

In a larger sense it feels like a sort of cultural touchstone/turning point for me, in that I started to really distrust the NPR sensibility after that, with my distrust solidified by the 2016 election season.

yeah, the emotional manipulation is pretty gross in retrospect

drifting off-topic a bit, s-town was where the tone of allegedly high-minded prurience established by s1 of serial really crossed a line - the way a lot of the most disturbing details were held back for the final episode and then dropped in after like seven hours of mostly careful, sympathetic reporting was gross

This ruling is surprising but fair: pic.twitter.com/FtYof20Pt9

— pixelated boat [ASMR] binaural ~4 hours~ (@pixelatedboat) March 29, 2018