Apple's 'S-Town' TV Series in the Works

A Hollywood adaptation of City S It's still a work in progress, with a new creative team.

Host Brian Reed tells The Hollywood Reporter that Apple TV+ is eyeing a limited series adaptation of the podcast, with Damages AND Bloodline co-creator Daniel Zelman is in charge of developing the project.

Apple TV+ declined to comment. Representatives for Zelman did not respond to requests for comment.

The hit 2017 nonfiction podcast centered on an eccentric and brilliant antique clock restorer and his complex relationship with a rural Alabama community. When it was released more than seven years ago, City S shattered podcast listening records, garnering 16 million downloads in its first week and 40 million in its first month. The seven-part series from the producers behind Serial AND This American Life has been praised for elevating the podcast form, with Slate considering it “auditory literature” and THE New Yorker stating in 2018 that of all the podcasts released up to that point, City S “seems more likely to endure as a work of art.” The series won a 2017 Peabody as “a pioneering classic of the genre.”

The podcast has also been the subject of controversy, sparking conversations about whether its subject, John B. McLemore, had properly consented to the project after his suicide early in the reporting and whether the podcast was invasive in its coverage of intimate details of McLemore's life. (Reed addresses these arguments in his new podcast about journalism, Put everything into question.) In 2018, the administrator of McLemore’s estate filed a lawsuit under Alabama’s right of publicity law, a dispute that was resolved two years later, with the estate withdrawing all objections to the podcast.

It's not the first time that Hollywood has tried its hand at City SIn 2018, Reflector Director Tom McCarthy was initially in talks to direct a film adaptation of the story, written by The whale playwright and screenwriter Samuel Hunter. Participant Media was set to produce, but the project was put on hold during the lawsuit, producer Julie Snyder told The Associated Press in 2020, and Participant Media closed its doors earlier this year. Now, Reed said, the project is assembling a new creative team.

This isn't the only series adaptation Reed has taken part in. The Trojan Horse AffairSerial Productions and The New York Times The podcast, co-created by Reed with Hamza Syed, is in development as a television series starring Riz Ahmed.

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