![]() ![]() The vibes may be shifting, but tales of people scamming, shamming, and swindling seem to be lasting well beyond summer, to the point where it’s basically the new monomyth. ![]() I wonder if there’ll be anything like it ever again. Hanks comes across as a peer looking back at his life - discerning its patterns and hoping to communicate some wisdom to a younger actor. That he was able to ultimately pay off the conceit - booking an actual sit-down with Hanks - could’ve just been the cherry on top of the project, except that it turned out to be one of the most interesting interviews you’ll ever find with the actor who’s famously nice to the point of opaque. For 30 episodes, Ratliff put together a soulful catalogue of conversations that collectively meditate on disappointment, heartbreak, failure, and the breaks of the game not just in show business but in life. The conceit featured actor and comedian Connor Ratliff mounting a seemingly quixotic quest to find out why Tom Hanks, famously the nicest man in show business, had abruptly fired him from a bit role on Band of Brothers for having “dead eyes,” and as the podcast started to unfold, it became apparent that what Ratliff really wanted to do was produce quiet, thoughtful, and funny interviews with friends and acquaintances about the tenuous nature of building a life in the entertainment business. When Dead Eyes started in early 2020, it was a little tricky to see where things would go. Read Nicholas Quah’s interview with the hosts of The Trojan Horse Affair. Yes, there’s a lot about The Trojan Horse Affair to debate - from the inherent navel-gazing quality of its philosophical interests to, of course, the nature of its ending - but very few teams come anywhere close to the ambitions of Reed and Syed, and even fewer are actually able to succeed. Reed and Syed’s tumble down the rabbit hole is the stuff of John le Carré novels, and the entire experience is elevated even further by how the show integrates the dynamics of the duo’s emerging partnership both as a framing device and a way to explore deeper themes about the production of collective truth. well into the present - and even after the release of the podcast itself. It’s a bombastically fun and mind-expanding conceit, and if you end up choosing to follow along with the subtitled version, you’ll find a fun, pulpy send-up of unsavory true-crime podcasts.Ī twisty thrill, an investigative stunner, and quite clearly Serial Productions’ best work since S-Town, The Trojan Horse Affair follows Brian Reed and Hamza Syed, a former doctor turned budding journalist, as they dive headfirst into the prevailing mysteries behind a political scandal that roiled Birmingham, England, in the early 2010s and has inflamed Islamophobic tensions throughout the U.K. As a collaboration with Italian producer Cristina Marras and an homage to the “Giallo” movie genre, part of what’s on display here are the ways the rough beats of standard true-crime or crime-fiction narratives are so pervasively familiar that almost anyone would likely be able to broadly follow along without direct knowledge of the language the story is presented in. The episode follows a true-crime podcaster as she tries to solve a series of murders, which, of course, turn out to be serial killings of true-crime podcasters, but the twist is how the work is performed entirely in Italian with the expectation that it will be principally consumed by people who don’t understand the language. ![]() The Imaginary Advice feed has long been a compelling laboratory for British writer Ross Sutherland’s various adventures in audio fiction, and with September’s “The True Crime of Your Frozen Death,” his experiment takes on big ideas about language, experience, and narrative comprehension. One has to admire the sheer confidence on display here.
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