ABSTRACT
Brian Reed, the producer and narrator of S-Town, is a journalist known for his work on This American Life, the Chicago Public Radio program hosted by Ira Glass. S-Town is essentially a docudrama told in seven episodes in the form of audio files. While acknowledging the power of this narrative structure, it is this essay’s contention that S-Town’s queerly intermedial form counteracts its ends-driven sequential form and its death-driven themes. In terms of narrative timing, intermedia work in a way that is somewhat at odds with the sequential form of the podcast. Users of the internet, for example, may well have read or have heard about John’s suicide, before reaching the disclosure of that event at the end of Chapter Two. The queer meaning of John B. McLemore and Tyler’s Goodson “church” ritual is, for example, accentuated by its placement in the final episode of the podcast’s sequential narrative.
