'Serial' team's new podcast is a murder mystery ripe for bingeing

Remember that magical fall of 2014 when all everyone could talk about was Serial? The murder mystery podcast from This American Life happened to be serialized -- a new episode every week -- but their latest endeavor, S-Town just dropped in full.

S-Town is about a lot of things, with a voice distinct from Serial and production quality of equal caliber. John, a This American Life listener, asks producer Brian Reed and the investigative team to come to his "pathetic little Baptist shit town" and explore an alleged murder -- and later, a much more personal story.

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All eight episodes dropped Tuesday morning, so it's binge time for everyone, starting with reviewers. USA Today's quick take was "You'll want to binge" this "delightfully unexpected" series of twists and turns.

Here's what Vulture's Nicholas Quah had to say:

There’s death in the podcast, sure. And there are crimes, more than a few. And most of the stories told are true. But having genre elements isn’t the same thing as fitting into a genre, and in that vein, S-Town is less a true-crime whodunit than a kaleidoscopic non-fiction novel in the shape of a true crime–tinged podcast, one whose narrative preoccupations are more tied to the spirit and myriad complexities of a place (in this case, the tiny rural town of Woodstock, Alabama) than the combustible tension of a mystery to be solved — though, there is a murder mystery involved, too.

CNET echoed the sentiment in a preview of the first four episodes:

What began as a possible true-crime story turned into something deeper and more complex. The intricacies of small-town life blend with McLemore's idiosyncratic personality and nonstop patter. The listener is strapped in for the roller-coaster ride in the same way that Reed was, not sure which deep dive the next episode will take. Is it an old-fashioned treasure hunt? A court case? A family feud? A small-town southern gothic tale?

Wired distinguishes S-Town from Serial in that "you keep listening not for hopes of resolution, but to figure out what exactly is happening."

“We can take our time, and wander for a while,” host Brian Reed told Wired. “When a novel starts talking about a character, you just trust that you’re reading a novel, and that’s what they do—we thought, maybe we can make a podcast that way.”

So buckle in kids: It's time to binge.

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Heck, the hype even caused technical issues:

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S-Town is now available to stream and binge at your leisure.