‘S-Town’ TV Show in the Works from Apple, Host Says

A Hollywood adaptation of S-Town is still in the works, with a fresh creative team. Host Brian Reed tells The Hollywood Reporter that Apple TV+ is eying a limited series adaptation of the podcast, with Damages and Bloodline co-creator Daniel Zelman attached to develop the project. Apple TV+ declined to comment. Zelman’s reps did respond to requests for comment. The hit 2017 nonfiction podcast centered on an oddball, genius antique clock restorer and his complex relationship with his rural Alabama community. When it was released over seven years ago, S-Town shattered podcast listenership records, gaining 16 million downloads in its first week and 40 million in its first month. The seven-part series from producers behind Serial and This American Life was praised for elevating the podcast form, with Slate deeming it “aural literature” and the New Yorker saying in 2018 that of all podcasts released up to that point, S-Town “seems most likely to endure as a work of art.” The series won a 2017 Peabody as a “pioneering classic of the form.” The podcast was also the subject of controversy, sparking conversation around whether its subject, John B. McLemore, adequately consented to the project after he died by suicide in the early stages of reporting and whether the podcast was invasive in its coverage of intimate details of McLemore’s life. (Reed addresses these arguments in his new podcast about journalism, Question Everything.) In 2018, the administrator for McLemore’s estate sued under Alabama’s right of publicity law, a dispute that was settled two years later, with the estate releasing all objections to the podcast. This is not Hollywood’s first go-around with S-Town. In 2018, Spotlight director Tom McCarthy was initially in talks to direct a film adaptation of the story, written by The Whale playwright and screenwriter Samuel Hunter. Participant Media was set to produce, but the project was put on hold during the lawsuit, producer Julie Snyder told the Associated Press in 2020, and Participant Media shuttered earlier this year. Now, Reed said, the project is putting together a new creative team. This isn’t the only series adaptation Reed is involved with. The Trojan Horse Affair, the Serial Productions and New York Times podcast which Reed co-created with Hamza Syed, is in development as a television series starring Riz Ahmed.