My daughter makes podcasts, and I spoke to her about how disturbing I found S-Town, the seven-part series from the This American Life team that has become a global phenomenon.



I found it ethically confronting in the deepest way: not whether it was good or bad radio, but whether this story should have been told at all. Whether this was a story so fraught and intrusive that it was one of those instances when a journalist, however reluctantly, should turn away. My daughter replied, in that crushing way unique to people who know you well: “But that’s what you do. You don’t really care about people, you care about the story.”

That is the crux of the dilemma with S-Town, praised as “aural literature”, “a new phase of maturity for audio storytelling”, with something approaching a novel’s openness to complexity.

It is superbly produced, innovative, fascinating and often achingly sad. But it also exemplifies journalism’s problematic heart. Most of the time it doesn’t matter much; a lot of the time, journalism is a rush of daily news, trying to get the basic facts and context right and occasionally righting a wrong.

But prick the facade, particularly in longer-form journalism, and it is always the reporter’s story being told, not the story of his or her subjects. And that complicates everything. The reporter, in this case Brian Reed, got to make the decision to investigate the personal life of a private citizen. John B McLemore had approached This American Life to urge the program to investigate what he believed was the cover-up of a murder in his hometown in Alabama in America’s south. That town is Woodstock, or “Shit Town”, as he called it.

Reed dug around and determined there had been no murder – McLemore was mistaken. Presumably, there was no story to be told. But when McLemore took his own life by drinking cyanide, Reed decided there was a story after all. It would be McLemore’s own painful journey, even though the eccentric clock restorer had never consented for his life to be investigated in this way.

This encapsulates the confronting truth of Janet Malcolm’s famous opening to her book, The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

S-Town is morally indefensible. The response to the guilt of knowing that – and it’s something I’ve grappled with more than once over the years – is to know that this is a good story, powerfully told with the best of intentions. That it has purpose. Occasionally something a bit like S-Town can nudge close to art in the way it peels away the layers of life.

That is at least a justification for the indefensible, but nobody can deny it’s a problematic one. The failure of Reed and This America Life is that they never mounted the defence, never explained to their listeners why they made the choices they made, even whether they found them difficult or easy decisions. They assume with a degree of arrogance that this is Reed’s story, not McLemore’s, whose agonies are laid out for our voyeuristic entertainment. Not in a cheap, tabloid TV way, but in a sophisticated, subtle way.

McLemore was a real person in his late 40s, full of rage about his hometown and its “snaggletoothed rednecks”, a place he loathes but never leaves. In his southern drawl, he rants about climate change and the world’s apathy towards it. He’s a clock restorer of world renown. He lives with his ageing mum and his stray dogs, and has built an incredible hedge maze on his remote property. It’s suggested that he is a genius. He has also suffered from depression since he was a teenager and, as Reed outlines, his mental state became much worse in the couple of years before he took his own life.

Eighteen months after McLemore contacted This American Life, Reed tells him that the rumours about a murder being covered up are wrong. Reed has moved on to other stories, and says he “hadn’t been so good about keeping in touch with John”. They talk on the phone every so often, and McLemore sends him long rambling emails about looming global calamity.

But then Reed gets a call from a woman from Woodstock. “John B killed his self Monday night.”

Reed keeps the tape running, recording his own distress, his “oh no, oh my gosh, oh I’m so sorry” responses. He never turns it off. This American Life’s strength is that it allows the listener into the process, that it doesn’t pretend that the reporter is an objective observer. It has built a reputation, and garnered trust, because it acknowledges that reporters are human beings responding to real people, trying to find things out as best they can.

But Reed doesn’t let us in, not really. Had he decided there was no story before McLemore’s suicide? When did he decide to tell McLemore’s story instead and why? All those hours of tapes he had of McLemore talking, sometimes raving – was there no issue with using them and then digging further to broadcast the most personal and sordid details of a man’s life?

The shock of McLemore’s suicide happens at the end of chapter two of S-Town. There are five more episodes, much of them meandering about, going nowhere much. There’s a treasure hunt for McLemore’s supposed gold, a lot of small-town conspiracy theories about the motive for McLemore’s death, and the sad life of Tyler Goodson, who was close to McLemore. Goodson is in his early 20s with three kids, uneducated and badly raised by his father, a convicted sex offender.

Reed details McLemore’s sexuality, which he has hidden from most people in his conservative hometown, and his lifelong yearning for love. Only once does Reed discuss the ethics of what he is doing. At one point, McLemore asks him to turn the tape off. Reed later explains why he is revealing that McLemore had told him off the record about an affair he had with a married man.

By way of explanation, Reed says that other people have told him the same story, and that John didn’t believe in God or an afterlife, so would be unaffected by S-Town. The most revealing reason is the last one. The information helped Reed understand McLemore more, “and I think trying to understand another person is a worthwhile thing to do”.

Understanding another person is worthwhile; whether to make a seven-part podcast series about a person, when they never agreed to it, is another question, and one that Reed unfortunately does not address. The interviews, hours and hours of tapes left whirring away, were granted by a person who was not a public figure, a person Reed knew was mentally ill, and agreed to for an entirely different purpose. That requires an explanation.

Towards the end, we get to the most intimate revelation about McLemore, a glimpse into his state of mind in the months before his death. He and Tyler hold their “church”, heavy drinking sessions where Tyler tattoos McLemore. It becomes obsessive. McLemore wants tattoos placed over other tattoos. He wants his nipples pierced, again and again, for the pain of it, to shut out his mental anguish.

He cuts down a branch of a tree and asks Tyler to whip him with it until he bleeds. He gets a tattoo of a whip around his neck, with bloody red marks all down his back. As Reed notes, it’s “very disturbing”. There is a suggestion that there is a fair chance that McLemore had mercury poisoning from a lifetime of practicing the ancient and dangerous technique of fire gilding to restore antique clocks. The symptoms are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, emotional instability, depression and suicidal thoughts.

McLemore told Reed about “church”, but described it as a drunken bonding session between mates. It is Tyler who provides the details and for me, it crossed over into voyeurism.

Does journalism require a purpose beyond entertainment, beyond telling a “good” story? Aren’t we all voyeurs? S-Town believes in itself, but it strains at the end to explain what the series was about, and whether it meant anything at all. The reporter reads from McLemore’s suicide note where he reflects on his life. It seems a contrived denouement, something journalists – and novelists – often do to relieve a tale of sorrow.

McLemore wrote a very long note, full of details about looming disaster, but also about what he enjoyed and appreciated in life. “When I look around me and see the leaden dispiritedness that envelops so many persons both young and old, I know that if I die tonight my life has been inestimably better than that of most of my compatriots.”

It is meant to move you. And you know it is meant to move you, to offer some redemption, some uplift even. But somehow it tries too hard, forcing itself to circle back to justify why the series was made it all. I only wish they’d acknowledged the conundrum at the heart of the program. I’d forgive them almost anything if they had done that. But without it, S-Town is undoubtedly a good story, but an indefensible one.

• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

