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tao of lmao posted:One nice thing of dumpin all the episodes at once is it likely saved the Florida cousins from tons of harassment. I think that's a big part of why they did it. Also, the twist at the end of episode two would have been discovered immediately.
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Mar 31, 2017 17:24
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Wow that maze owns so hard
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Mar 31, 2017 19:05
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33.202465, -87.13115 for those who don't wanna go back
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Mar 31, 2017 19:28
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I thought it would be bigger, like a true maze. You can walk out of that thing. Also, the final episode actually made me  since I could find a way to relieve my anger at Jon.
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Mar 31, 2017 21:33
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I'm in the middle of episode 5 but yeah it really was a poo poo town after all! They did not lie
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Mar 31, 2017 21:35
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The REAL Goobusters posted:I'm in the middle of episode 5 but yeah it really was a poo poo town after all! They did not lie Lots of twists and turns, don't guess its conclusion.
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Apr 1, 2017 00:56
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UltraRed posted:Lots of twists and turns, don't guess its conclusion. I stand by my post after finishing the series!
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Apr 1, 2017 23:12
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Crisco Kid posted:gently caress "KyKenKee" Kenneth and his entire family for real, though. I hope somebody snatches that land up from him ASAP. life is a joke posted:*doesn't dispute or deny obvious KKK reference* Knowing Rita sold it to him really makes me rethink my reevaluation of her too.
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Apr 2, 2017 00:07
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S-town is extremely good.
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Apr 2, 2017 02:03
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I don't have much to add, S-Town was good and interesting. Wish it had more closure, but hell, you always do with these things. Even though I like TAL and Serial, it took me a long time to give it a chance and I'm not sure why. The name and ads didn't attract me, and I mistakenly thought for a while that it was a fiction story! Did want to mention the soundtrack is also good though: https://danielhartmusic.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-s-town ("Longleaf Pines" and "Black Bear" are particularly chill)
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Apr 2, 2017 09:33
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Crisco Kid posted:Man, I'm going to need a few days to mull over S-Town. I found it uncomfortable and relatable and infuriating and true and FRUSTRATING in too many ways to unpack at once. I know a bunch of fellow Alabamians who are listening to it, and I'm champing at the bit to get a mass Facebook convo going or something before I crawl out of my skin. I've got as far as Episode 4 and I'm super ambivalent. It's certainly unique and a strange story / stories. But I'm uncomfortable about lots of things: the problems of consent and privacy, the feeling of a bait-and-switch and the slow pace of the story, the TAL-cliche of the reporter telling you what they feel about the story, the overall that I'm not sure why I should listen to this. Honestly don't know whether I'll go further. nonathlon fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Apr 2, 2017 |
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Apr 2, 2017 14:46
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That story the clerk told about John calling her and drinking arsenic was chilling. I wish he would have actually gotten the help he obviously needed.
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Apr 2, 2017 16:50
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The privacy/consent question occurred to me as well, but what's the reporter's responsibility to save people from their lack of self-censorship? He openly identifies himself as a reporter at every opportunity - unless you think he misrepresented people for narrative purposes (a legitimate concern), he's observed his ethical obligations.
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Apr 2, 2017 21:55
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a lot of average people probably don't understand how their life could change if they give an interview and it becomes part of something that blows up really big in the media. but that isn't exactly a problem with this show, it's more just the general human problem of "person gets involved in something before understanding all the ways it might affect them" also the reporter seems to have respected the people who didn't want to be recorded, and the people who didn't want their names used
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Apr 2, 2017 22:00
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Sarah Koenig (and Julie Snyder) showed up on Wait, Wait this weekend and talked a bit about S-Town, including what it almost got named instead of what they went with. Koenig also mentioned that she is working on Serial Season 3, but was very tight-lipped about what it was about or when it would be released. Also I think her normal relaxed speaking voice is so much more pleasant than her radio reporter voice.
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Apr 2, 2017 22:14
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The Modern Leper posted:The privacy/consent question occurred to me as well, but what's the reporter's responsibility to save people from their lack of self-censorship? He openly identifies himself as a reporter at every opportunity - unless you think he misrepresented people for narrative purposes (a legitimate concern), he's observed his ethical obligations.
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Apr 2, 2017 22:41
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sexpig by night posted:I think there's a lot of valid talk to be had about this but this dude is a real bad example because he did some poo poo like reveal off the record conversations for hilariously stupid justifications that transparently boil down to 'they make the story more interesting and I want to'. Like, there's a lot of wiggly space in the talk about how much 'access' a journalist should feel they have to a subject but he clearly felt that those lines don't even exist for a good story. This is pretty much how I feel. The "but he's an atheist" argument seemed particularly specious. Atheists have families too, just because they're dead and gone doesn't mean their secrets can't cause others pain. There's just something unseemly about a paranoid mentally ill man calling up a reporter, and that reporter using it as carte blanche to reveal all the details of his personal life. Even people who are used to talking to reporters usually get briefed on what to say and what to expect, because it's easy to say things in the moment without realizing how they will come back to bite you. This man had no way of guessing what would come out of his conversations.
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Apr 3, 2017 00:06
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in_cahoots posted:This is pretty much how I feel. The "but he's an atheist" argument seemed particularly specious. Atheists have families too, just because they're dead and gone doesn't mean their secrets can't cause others pain. yea that genuinely made me angry for a sec. The idea that 'repercussions' starts and stops at him for something like that is so absurd he might as well have just said 'yea I'm trying to tell a story and this makes the story stronger'. It'd still be scummy but at least that way it's like 'oh, yea ok fair'. But yea I just have some pretty serious ethical issues with the show as a whole, though I'm willing to say those are more personal morality things than an objective 'he did a bad thing here' thing. That one case was an example where I feel he completely crossed the line by any standards, though. It's one thing to say 'ok something huge happened during what should have been kinda a puff 'local oddball talks to reporter for a bit of humanizing' thing, I feel I have a duty to follow this through'. It's a complete different ballgame to say 'so that means now my focus is on a narrative and that means everything said to me that fits that narrative is open season'.
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Apr 3, 2017 02:02
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oh god the final episode and the tattoo/piercing stuff  and that nazi guy what the gently caress
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Apr 3, 2017 02:51
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I'm sure absolutely everyone interviewed on this show signed the requisite legal documents. Also when you say something to a reporter "off the record" that reporter isn't obligated to keep it a secret - if you want to keep it secret you don't tell the reporter to begin with. It just means you don't want to be directly recorded or quoted. Paraphrasing is fine. Reporters aren't lawyers or priests and they're not up to some holy standard of mirandizing everyone they speak to before an interview. Honestly it seems like most of these people are happy enough to get the attention. If they were recorded, they signed forms. edit: I agree with many of you in that the self-insertion in this series is not good. The reporter is always the least interesting person in these stories and their role should be minimized as much as possible. bad day fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 04:08
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Raar_Im_A_Dinosaur posted:On a darkly humorous note, the guy who got shot in the head and turned into a hype man Listening to episode VII and this comment kept creeping into my head as Tyler described John's tattoos and kept giggling as the uncle did his "hype man" routine. Thank you for the levity, I suppose as he described the masochism of the man.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:10
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bad day posted:I'm sure absolutely everyone interviewed on this show signed the requisite legal documents. I mean you do know the context for the thing that we're talking about right? I don't think 'well he's happy to get attention' counts for much. Yea no poo poo they didn't break laws or whatever. It was just a dick move that makes it look like their word means nothing when it comes to sensitive things.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:15
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It seems like they'd all hang out sometimes and do that stuff to him together. It definitely recontextualizes a lot of earlier recorded conversations.
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Apr 3, 2017 04:16
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If you think S-Town was out ethics you clearly aren't familiar with modern documentary television programming. I don't really understand why people so strongly object to grey ethics in podcasting when there are entire industries within the mainstream media that do nothing but stalk and harass celebrities 24/7. It just seems like a weird place to be drawing an ethical line considering literally everything everyone else is always doing. bad day fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Apr 3, 2017 |
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Apr 3, 2017 04:21
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bad day posted:If you think S-Town was out ethics you clearly aren't familiar with modern documentary television programming. th-those are bad too? But this isn't the TMZ thread? So we're talking about S-Town in the TAL thread?
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Apr 3, 2017 04:36
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I'm not uncomfortable in that these people had their voices aired internationally, but that they gave some pretty raw, uncomfortable content voice that I haven't heard outside of those communities. I think it's worthy of being shared. The ethics of this journalism style are up for debate, but to me it feels John *wanted* this explored, on multiple levels. Not so much this specific inciting incident, but as a microcosm of the relationship he had with his town and neighbors and home. It was symbolic. I think he needed to share and vent in ways he wasn't fully ready to do for himself, and - in his absence - his community had to do the rest of the lifting. So they did. The result is a complex, difficult story with no clear answers, that both conforms to and defies stereotypes, and refuses to be written-off. Which is exactly why it needs to be told.
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Apr 3, 2017 06:54
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bad day posted:I'm sure absolutely everyone interviewed on this show signed the requisite legal documents. There's at least one person who the reporter doesn't know the name of, which would indicate that not everyone signed off. What are the guidelines for this sort of thing? quote:edit: I agree with many of you in that the self-insertion in this series is not good. The reporter is always the least interesting person in these stories and their role should be minimized as much as possible. It's very much the NPR style, isn't it? And I found the reporter a bit fake as well.
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Apr 3, 2017 07:48
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outlier posted:There's at least one person who the reporter doesn't know the name of, which would indicate that not everyone signed off. What are the guidelines for this sort of thing?
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Apr 3, 2017 11:11
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I think it's one of the guys in the tattoo spot in ep 2?
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Apr 3, 2017 13:45
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I get this argument, but this is pretty much a criticism against the entire TAL model, since a lot of those stories rely on candid interviews with non-savvy subjects. Definitely agree that disclosing that story about that relationship was dicey, especially since he (1) describes an interview with the other person involved, and (2) pretends to preserve the subject's anonymity, while revealing a bunch of identifying details.
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Apr 3, 2017 14:11
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Based on that one released photo, it's not like Brian had a little subtle dictaphone, he was wearing massive headphones and literally holding a mic up to people's faces. Hard to say people didn't know what they were getting into with that.
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Apr 3, 2017 14:49
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I really think shittown is a masterpiece, just so subtle, and it does interesting things with disclosure that are pretty uncomfortable (it IS strange that he doesn't get the "feed me" guy's name at the tattoo shop when you think there'd be a written release like if you were filming someone). One other thing I noticed, which I can't tell if I'm reading too deeply into or not: chapter VI- Brian Reed describes an unrecorded interview with a closeted guy (a "bad guy" who John had spoken about other times and worked on his yard) that had a relationship with John. When he gets to asking him about whether there was anything sexual in their relationship, he paraphrases the guy's answer which is just a grunt ('uhnnn' sound). But back in chapter 2, around 43 mins in, John is describing a conversation with Tyler where he makes the exact same 'uhnn' sound and mentions that his father has the same mannerisms, and would always make the same sound. Reed implies that 1. John knows Tyler's father well enough to mention his mannurisms and 2. makes the exact same sorta-idiosyncratic sound when paraphrasing the later interview. Maybe I'm crazy, but when you consider the heavy editing and writing around the show, I think the connection is there. So Reed is winkily telling us about another layer of the story without putting it officially on the record; theres another way that John is an "ersatz" father figure to Tyler
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Apr 3, 2017 18:56
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yea it was v. cool when he outed that dude in a small town using super obvious and not at all subtle clues but didn't actually confirm or deny anything so the rumor mill can be the main decider in a really fuckin sensitive topic
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Apr 3, 2017 18:58
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sexpig by night posted:yea it was v. cool when he outed that dude in a small town using super obvious and not at all subtle clues but didn't actually confirm or deny anything so the rumor mill can be the main decider in a really fuckin sensitive topic It is though. It's an interesting narrative solution to the problem of true-crime shows like Serial that get 'too close' to their subject. They've learned to play off that ambiguity and make it a part of the work rather than something that the host wrings their hands about uselessly. Do you think these rumors wouldn't circulate anyway? If some random reporter found out about it and then put it on the show I'm willing to bet its a bigger open secret than you're assuming.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:08
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Very similarly, the "we talked about digging up buried treasure, then had to go off the record  " end to Tyler's story. It must have been a satisfying conclusion for anyone who happens to be named Brian Reed but it's the opposite of a conclusion for the rest of us, and awfully suspicious behavior from someone who has been charged with stealing from that property.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:11
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I bet Johnny B spent all his money and now a lot of people are going to dig up the property looking for something that's not there.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:17
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Electoral Surgery posted:Very similarly, the "we talked about digging up buried treasure, then had to go off the record I thought it was a very good/satisfying conclusion that is consistent with the themes of the show. A podcast about events that have already transpired only has to answer for itself and its coherence as a narrative, it doesn't have to solve anything, dispense justice, or protect people from themselves.
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Apr 3, 2017 19:20
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sexpig by night posted:yea it was v. cool when he outed that dude in a small town using super obvious and not at all subtle clues but didn't actually confirm or deny anything so the rumor mill can be the main decider in a really fuckin sensitive topic If you think giving non-committal grunts and "mmmnn"s in response to a question is a mannerism unique to just a handful of individuals in that town I promise you that's not the case. I don't see the connection.
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Apr 3, 2017 20:03
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Wake_N_Bake posted:If you think giving non-committal grunts and "mmmnn"s in response to a question is a mannerism unique to just a handful of individuals in that town I promise you that's not the case. I don't see the connection. Go back and listen to the clips and consider how carefully everything is written, and how many really smart radio producers with decades of experience were involved in this, and how long they have been crafting this whole story, listening to the same clips over and over again. Even if it's not literally true (which again they aren't saying), the implication is there and they know it
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Apr 3, 2017 20:46
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I didn't make that connection, and I am the smartest person in the whole world.
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Apr 3, 2017 21:37
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