A Hollywood adaptation of S-City remains to be in the works, with a contemporary inventive staff.
Apple TV+ declined to remark. Zelman’s reps did 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 neighborhood. When it was launched over seven years in the past, S-City shattered podcast listenership data, gaining 16 million downloads in its first week and 40 million in its first month. The seven-part collection from producers behind Serial and This American Life was praised for elevating the podcast kind, 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 “seems most likely to endure as a work of art.” The collection gained a 2017 Peabody as a “pioneering classic of the form.”
The podcast was additionally the topic of controversy, sparking dialog round whether or not its topic, John B. McLemore, adequately consented to the undertaking after he died by suicide in the early phases 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 legislation, 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 supply, however the undertaking was placed on maintain throughout the lawsuit, producer Julie Snyder informed the Related Press in 2020, and Participant Media shuttered earlier this yr. Now, Reed mentioned, the undertaking is placing collectively a brand new inventive staff.
This isn’t the solely collection adaptation Reed is concerned with. The Trojan Horse Affair, the Serial Productions and New York Occasions podcast which Reed co-created with Hamza Syed, is in improvement as a tv collection starring Riz Ahmed.
