S-Town

S-Town was an American investigative journalism podcast hosted by Brian Reed and created by the producers of Serial and This American Life. All seven chapters were released on March 28, 2017. The podcast was downloaded a record-breaking 10 million times in four days and had been downloaded over 40 million times by May 2017. Synopsis In 2012, horologist John B. McLemore sent an email to the staff of the show This American Life asking them to investigate an alleged murder in his hometown of Woodstock, Alabama, a place he claimed to despise. After a year of exchanging emails and several months of conversation with McLemore, producer Brian Reed traveled to Woodstock to investigate. He investigated the crime and eventually found that no such murder took place, though he struck up a friendship with McLemore, a "depressed but colorful" character. He recorded conversations with McLemore and other people in Woodstock, which are played on the podcast. McLemore killed himself by drinking potassium cyanide on June 22, 2015, while the podcast was still in production. In the narrative of the podcast, this occurs at the end of the second episode, and subsequent episodes deal with the fallout from McLemore's death while exploring more of McLemore's life and character. Though the podcast was promoted under the name S-Town, Reed reveals in the first episode that this is a euphemism for "Shit-Town", McLemore's derogatory term for Woodstock. Reed generally refers to the podcast by the non-euphemized name in the episodes themselves. People involved