S-Town and the Comforts of Aesthetic Hierarchy

There was a moment there when podcasts threatened to do something different.

It is early days yet for this medium and, as in the early days of cinema and radio, genre lines and corresponding prestige seemed, at least for a few years, to be shifting rapidly beneath our feet. There have of course been, almost since the podcast's inception, the longform magazine-y shows that have perfected a fairly familiar form of narrative journalism: This American Life, Radiolab, and, more recently, Invisibilia. Brilliant though these often are, they mostly produce work familiar in its structure and subject matter and, generally speaking, work of the kinds already suited to Pulitzer Prizes and other such forms of institutional acclaim. That is to say, these magazine-y podcasts win the kind of praise granted to excellent magazine journalism.

But with the advent in 2014 of Serial, the This American Life offshoot, a kind of anarchy threatened to reign alongside these more staid versions of nonfiction podcasting. Season 1 of Serial resurrected the most exceedingly fun form of lowbrow crime reporting, granted it a kind of Paul Auster reflexive gloss, and won plaudits from every sector of cultural criticism in the process. Suddenly it seemed critical praise was due not just to the standard magazine fair, but to a genre usually the province of grocery store paperbacks. Serial Season 2 may have missed the mark in many respects, but it continued to upend aesthetic hierarchies in its willingness to make the true crime cliffhanger the dominant plot structure of critically-praised podcasting.

2017, however, has witnessed two events that have quickly put the usual aesthetic hierarchies back in place. First came the release of the widely panned Missing Richard Simmons. If true crime always threatens to veer into tabloid invention, Missing Richard Simmons made clear that podcast true crime was no exception to the rule. The once-a-week release schedule meant a series of breathy cliffhangers, each more disappointing than the next, and the narrative payoff was about as poor as could be: an emotional appeal to the show's titular missing person that hoped to hide behind pathos the fact that the show's investigate reporting revealed, more or less, nothing.

Second came S-Town, a story that returned longform podcasting to realist terrain, narrativised the abandonment of true crime, and was praised far and wide for doing just those two things. S-Town begins with the overt promise of true crime in its soapiest form: a murder and police coverup set in the gothic environs of a poor, racist, southern town. But, by the end of episode 2, the true crime genre is entirely abandoned. The murder turns out not to have happened, and the remaining 5 episodes turn to an exploration of the ersatz tipster's character. The remaining hours are essentially a form of realism: a careful study of the interaction between setting and character, replete with symbolism and nicely embedded in the larger cultural history of America. If a podcast can be Henry Jamesian, then this is a Jamesian podcast.

The confluence of Missing Richard Simmons' failure and S-Town's triumph have quickly restored true crime and realism to their usual aesthetic relationship: the former degraded, the latter exulted. This is in some ways disappointing. One of the exciting possibilities of Serial was that, through the new medium of podcasting, the lowbrow genre of true crime might be reinvented in highbrow terms in a way not really attempted since the era of New Journalism (beginning with Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and ending with Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song). But the historical accident of Missing Richard Simmons and S-Town being released in rapid succession has meant that the critical appraisals of both genres have been returned to their comfortable norm. Missing Richard Simmons, though a single text, stands in for the failures of the entire true crime genre; S-Town, a particularly fine example of realism, proves the case that realism has always been a more important artistic mode.