NPR: Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast: Small Batch: Serial

December 23, 2014 8:33 AM

In this Pop Culture Happy Hour extra, Linda Holmes talks with Gene Demby about the podcast Serial, a spin-off of This American Life. They'll discuss the podcasts created to discuss Serial and why listeners are picking apart episodes as if it's True Detective.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (2 comments total)

So, this is a nice, short mini-episode of PCHH, as the name 'small batch' indicates.

I could listen to Linda Holmes' voice all day - bit of a fan - but she works well with Gene Demby here, who is from NPR's Code Switch if you're unfamiliar.

They touch upon something that was addressed in this recent MetaFilter post (I made), which is: this is real-life, and the discomfort of sort of salaciously getting caught up in a real-life murder case. Does it make you squeamish? This isn't a detective novel, this is real life - is it disrespectful to the dead, and to the others in this case, to get as "into" as you would, say, HBO's TV series, "True Detective".

I don't think any answers were reached but it does make for some uncomfortable middle-class tying-yourself-in-knots should-I-enjoy-this-or-not? gymnastics.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 11:38 AM on December 23, 2014

This was a good Small Batch, but I just kept laughing at the fact that I was listening to a podcast about podcasts about a podcast.

(cue BWOMMMM Inception sound effect)
posted by Etrigan at 3:19 PM on December 23, 2014 [3 favorites]