| No Images? Click here   "S-Town," the new podcast from the creators of "Serial" and "This American Life," released all of its episodes at once, Netflix style, last week. The show is remarkable: ambitious, sweeping, novelistic, touching. You should listen. (Maybe you already have.) Our own Todd Van Luling asked Brian Reed and Julie Snyder, the people behind the show, about what it took to make it great. Here's an edited excerpt of that interview. How did "Serial" affect this project? Julie Snyder: Obviously, if “Serial” had tanked ... well, you know, Ira [Glass, of "This American Life"] is actually very supportive, so he probably would have supported us. Brian Reed: We did feel like we could veer off the path. I don’t know if it was because of “Serial.” We’re all formerly or currently producers on “This American Life.” And even though that’s a specific format, within the format, there’s a spirit of experimentation that we try to foster among each other.... We’re always out to amuse ourselves and try to do things to keep ourselves interested. So I think it came more out of that spirit: We like to try new things, and this story seemed to lend itself to maybe trying something a little different. A slower burn. [But] we were definitely cognizant that it was different. JS: We’re really, really not mercantile people. We’re just not good at thinking about, “What does the market want?” and “We will give it to them so that we can make money.” We just have different ways of telling stories and things that are interesting to us, and certainly, yeah, I think the success of “Serial” allows that. I think we could still be doing it, but the fact that people actually hear it and pay attention to it. But then it’s like, I don’t know. The success of “Serial” is our ability to tell stories, so that's why ["S-Town" is possible]. It’s like, yeah, it’s a really good story. You wanted “S-Town” to feel like a novel, right? BR: I wanted to signal to the listeners that this is the kind of story this is. It’s going to feel a little literary and a little more like a novel than a TV show, maybe. Some podcasts feel a little more structured after serialized TV; this is more like a book you might sit down to read over the course of a week or two. JS: It was really explicit. We talked about it as a novel and we referenced novels. We both looked at the same novels. BR: My hope for it is that people listen to this kind of in the way that they would read a novel. Maybe you do it all at once. You sit down and tear through it, and that’d be awesome. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that. Or, over the course of a week where you listen before you go to bed or while you’re commuting or whatever like that, it kind of embeds itself in your brain a little bit. You’re just doing your normal day stuff and you’ve got this little window in to your little world, like, in your brain like you would with a good novel. JS: We don’t even consider the episodes as episodes. They’re chapters. It just feels like a book. BR: And that’s kind of like why I did the story. I like the story and I like that I have this place and these people in my head, and that’s the experience I’m trying to give people who listen to it, basically. There’s no news imperative to tell this story. It’s just, I like it.       The three can't-miss must reads this week 
 It is utterly shameful that the Larry Nassar story isn't front-page news the way the Sandusky story was
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Sunday, April 9, 2017
Welcome to S***town
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