S-Town’s Brian Reed Is Coming To Australia To Answer All Your Important Questions
Prepare to get very excited and/or mad.
Spoilers ahead for S-Town.
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Prepare to get very excited and/or mad, because the man behind one of the year’s most contentious pop-culture phenomenons is coming to Australia.
Brian Reed is the creator and host of S-Town, the seven-part non-fiction podcast that broke download records and generated an endless wave of online commentary. A fascinating but ethically dubious production about the troubled life and tragic death of an eccentric clock repairer in rural Alabama, the show has been both praised and lambasted for its depiction of poverty, prejudice and mental illness. One critic labeled the whole project “morally indefensible”.
For what it’s worth, Reed has since defended the podcast, and in particular his decision to pursue the story even after his subject committed suicide. “I don’t believe that when a reporter is doing a story about someone who has died, that they can only include elements that the person consented to when they were alive,” he told Pacific Standard. “I don’t believe that’s an ethical problem.”
But if you’re not satisfied with that answer, you can confront Reed yourself when he visits our shore for a pair of ticketed events in late July. First up he’ll be in Melbourne for the latest installment of the Wheeler Centre’s Invasion of the Pod People, before heading to the Sydney Opera House for a “part conversation, part Q and A” fittingly titled We Need To Talk About S-Town.
Brian Reed Australian tour
Wednesday July 26 – Athenaeum Theatre, Melbourne
Saturday July 29 – Sydney Opera House, Sydney