S-Town review: More than a basket of deplorables

“I am 49 years old,” a thick Southern accent drawls through the phone. “I shoulda got out of this goddamn f***in’ shit-town in my twenties. I shoulda done something useful with my life.”

The voice belongs to John B McLemore: a polymathic clock-maker who—like his mother and grandfather before him—has lived in Woodstock, Alabama all his life. He is also its fiercest critic. In 2012, McLemore sent an email to journalist Brian Reed, captioned “John B McLemore lives in Shit town Alabama,” in which he claimed that Woodstock was rife with corruption. There had been a police sexual abuse scandal, he said, as well as a murder cover-up. “What it needs,” he told Reed, “is for someone like you to come down here and blow this pathetic little Baptist shit town out off the map.” After a year and a half of regular contact with McLemore, Reed went to Woodstock to investigate.

This is the premise of S-Town, a new podcast from the creators of Serial and This American Life, hosted by Reed. The chances are you’ll already have heard some of the buzz around the show. When the seven-episode series finally dropped (all in one go, on 28^th March), it received four million downloads in four days. Since then S-Town has attracted a huge amount of attention and praise. The New York Times commended it for “transcend[ing] the podcast procedural with a destabilising narrative”; elsewhere it has been described as “life-affirming,” and a “kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel.”

S-Town is an extraordinary feat—on one level a crime-tinged mystery, full of shocking twists; on the other a rich character portrait, painted with empathy and humour. Over the course of seven episodes we follow Reed’s journey through Woodstock to learn the truth behind the rumours in McLemore's email. What really happened to apparent murder victim Dillon Nichols? Why is there no account of his death in the local news or on the internet? These questions are intriguing—but ultimately the series is not about scandal. Rather, it’s about Woodstock, and John B McLemore himself.

A large part of the podcast’s success is down to Reed’s thoughtful narration. Reed is a mesmerising communicator, carefully drawing out the complexities and eccentricities of his protagonist. Simply put, John—it feels inappropriately formal to refer to him by his last name—is an astonishing human being. When he isn’t fixing or embellishing antique clocks, he tends to his 350-foot-long rose garden, builds a hedge maze (with 64 possible solutions), helps out disadvantaged members of the community and frets about climate change. Though he feels lonely and frustrated in Woodstock, he can’t leave. "So why don’t I move?" he sighs. "There’s gotta be people in Fallujah right now, or Beirut, that just asked each other the same question." It's home.

This sense of human connectivity is a central theme of the series—despite never having ventured outside of his tiny town, John sees himself as a citizen of the world. Yet John could not be more of a Woodstock man: he helped to build up the town in the years after it was officially founded; he has lived there for his entire life, and for all his exasperation, he cares deeply about its citizens. At the same time, however, he still sees himself as connected, intrinsically, to human beings in Beirut and Fallujah.

This is not to say that John is a flawless incarnation of liberal values. He appears to foster some racist and sexist attitudes—and there is a limit to his ability to connect with others. John, a vocal atheist, has always found it difficult to form relationships with his Woodstock peers. Most of his friends are now elderly or dead. “Even when I was a kid I wasn't talking to other kids,” he tells Reed during one of their long phone conversations. “Cos, you know, kids are talking about getting girls or deer hunting... Whereas I was interested in geometry, new age music, climate change and how to solve Rubik's cubes.” This social alienation feeds his frustration towards the town, and leads him to make condescending remarks about “rednecks”: “Try to explain that the earth is more than five thousand years old!”

One of the best aspects of the show is that it refuses to take sides. When Reed interviews the town’s other inhabitants, they are not tarred with John's pessismistic brush, but given careful attention. From the elderly Miss Hicks, who is obsessed with the singer Andrea Bocelli (“that man's got a voice like an angel”), to the white supremacist tattoo artist Bubba, everyone gets a fair hearing. These quirks are essential to the detail of the narrative. Woodstock’s inhabitants are flawed, in the case of Bubba disturbingly so, but they are nevertheless mindful of each other and often introspective.

S-Town isn’t simply an account of a wasted genius stunted by what Hillary Clinton might call a “basket of deplorables.” At every point where it would be easy to slip into an “us and them” stance, Reed takes a more complex view. At a time where small white communities in the US rust belt are protesting after being disregarded by the “liberal elite,” Reed’s nuanced perspective is important. The story he narrates is captivating, timely, and above all human. S-Town lives up to the hype.