When he first emails Reed out of the blue in 2014, he seems like a quirky but typical small-town eccentric, a random This American Life fan who wants Reed and the show to come to Alabama to help him solve a local mystery. It takes S-Town a while to discover all these facets, and more, of John’s life. Īll that, and he may be sitting on a fortune in buried treasure. John is all of the following: a queer liberal conspiracist who socializes with neighborhood racists a manic depressive consumed by predictions of cataclysmic global catastrophe an off-the-grid hoarder of gold who takes in stray dogs a genius with a photographic memory who’s spent his whole life caring for his mother while designing a massive and elaborate hedge maze in his backyard and one of the most skilled antique clock restorers in the world. Reed describes him as a “local Boo Radley,” but he owes far more to Jim Williams - the last semi-closeted real-life antiquarian living on legacy antebellum property to inspire his own Southern gothic tell-all. But John is much more than just an avatar for rural disenfranchisement. Throughout the narrative, John’s festering rage and the disquieting apathy of the town’s residents seem to feed off one another. the full story of the “B” isn’t revealed until the podcast’s final moments - lives in Woodstock, a small town near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which he scathingly dubs “Shittown” to anyone who’ll listen. The most eccentric resident in S-Town, a.k.a. Yet in spite of their complexity and range, S-Town’s coverage of these topics ultimately amounts to a deep dive into one man’s mental health - a journey I don’t believe he ever explicitly invited us to take.
These topics come to include isolation and sexual repression, which are shadowed by the looming and overarching threat of societal collapse due to socioeconomic upheaval and climate change.
It’s this harsh truth that underscores the podcast’s many difficult, brutal, and inevitably controversial topics. On a broader scale, S-Town is about the insurmountable challenge of living that any of us might seem to face at one point or another. The friend he’s talking about is John B., a dizzyingly eccentric, real-life Southern gothic hero whose turbulent unrest fuels the series and constantly wars with his drive to create change and beauty in his rural Alabama community.īut it’s important to be clear that despite its Serial roots and an investigative premise that initially seems like a journalistic jaunt into an unresolved murder, S-Town is not a true crime podcast. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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