‘S-Town’ TV Show in the Works From Apple

A Hollywood adaptation of S-City remains to be within the works, with a contemporary artistic crew.

Host Brian Reed tells The Hollywood Reporter that Apple TV+ is eying a restricted sequence adaptation of the podcast, with Damages and Bloodline co-creator Daniel Zelman hooked up to develop the venture.

Apple TV+ declined to remark. Zelman’s reps didn’t reply to requests for remark.

The hit 2017 nonfiction podcast centered on an oddball, genius vintage clock restorer and his complicated relationship along with his rural Alabama group. When it was launched over seven years in the past, S-City shattered podcast listenership information, gaining 16 million downloads in its first week and 40 million in its first month. The seven-part sequence from producers behind Serial and This American Life was praised for elevating the podcast type, with Slate deeming it “aural literature” and The New Yorker saying in 2018 that of all podcasts launched as much as that time, S-City “appears most certainly to endure as a murals.” The sequence received a 2017 Peabody as a “pioneering traditional of the shape.”

The podcast was additionally the topic of controversy, sparking dialog round whether or not its topic, John B. McLemore, had adequately consented to the venture after he died by suicide within the early levels of reporting and whether or not the podcast was invasive in its protection of intimate particulars of McLemore’s life. (Reed addresses these arguments in his new podcast about journalism, Query Every part.) In 2018, the administrator for McLemore’s property sued underneath Alabama’s proper of publicity regulation, a dispute that was settled two years later, with the property releasing all objections to the podcast.

This isn’t Hollywood’s first go-around with S-City. In 2018, Highlight director Tom McCarthy was initially in talks to direct a movie adaptation of the story, written by The Whale playwright and screenwriter Samuel Hunter. Participant Media was set to provide, however the venture was placed on maintain through the lawsuit, producer Julie Snyder advised The Related Press in 2020, and Participant Media shuttered earlier this 12 months. Now, Reed mentioned, the venture is placing collectively a brand new artistic crew.

This isn’t the one sequence adaptation Reed is concerned with. The Trojan Horse Affair, the Serial Productions and New York Occasions podcast that Reed co-created with Hamza Syed, is in growth as a tv sequence starring Riz Ahmed.