S-Town podcast: Host Brian Reed on whether John B McLemore enjoys the podcast and the possibility of a season 2

'I did try to make it in his spirit'

*This post contains spoilers for Shit Town, if you haven’t finished the seven episodes yet you might want to click away. The headline reads present tense so as not to give away the twist*

John B. McLemore invited This American Life’s Brian Reed to Woodstock, Alabama to cover a death, but not his own. As such, what would John have made of the podcast, which ultimately becomes about his brief but fascinating life?

“I hope he would get a kick out of it, I really do,” Reed told EW.

“I did try to make it in his spirit. I feel like he infuses the whole thing, even with the writing. I took a cue from the way he speaks which is very high-low — he uses incredible words that people don’t often use in regular conversation, like “proleptic decrepitude,” and that’s jammed right up against “s–t” and “crude f–k” right under the same breath. I kind of tried to get that spirit into my writing. He kind of led the way in terms of the tone and language of the show. You’ve got people talking about nipple piercings juxtaposed with beautiful music. That whole spirit of the show, I hope he would appreciate."s

S-Town has been making listeners laugh and cry, and many reviews (including our own) have declared it better than Serial.

Some kind of follow-up will be craved by a lot of people, but, while Reed isn’t ruling it out, he doesn’t plan to pick the story back up.

“I think of this as the story, like a book or novel,” he said. “I don’t have plans.

“I lean towards not doing anything more with it, I lean toward letting this be the story. I really like the ending so it feels weird to me that I would make another ending. I wouldn’t rule out anything but I don’t have plans to follow it up. Shit Town really is about John B. McLemore and his frame of mind.”