Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative

Most of all, I think the podcaster needs to get a degree in social work to clue in to how she presents herself (and misrepresents herself) and puts herself in her subjects’ shoes. She misses obvious signs of trauma and mental health issues and defaults to examining her own meta ideas. Very interesting idea though. Get a social worker in your team though, STAT!

See title. I hope her subjects are doing well, and I sincerely hope Jess does better in the future. With peace and love, I think she would benefit from some self reflection on her pretentious nature and ask if documentary work is really what she excels at. I think she has a talent for podcasting as an audio art, but her storytelling skills I think could use some work.

I kept waiting for this to turn into something more interesting… for the twist or insight. But it never came. I also had relatively high expectations due to the fact that this was rated one of the top podcasts of the year, but aim sorry to say that it wasn’t even one of the top podcasts I listened to this week. (and I’m not a true crime fan or sensationalist when it comes to podcasts so I don’t need constant stimulation. But this just really fell short.) First, I’m sorry, but the people profiled are not very interesting, especially Ernesto, who speaks in a monotone and has nothing at all to say. Michael is more likable, but he’s similarly superficial and doesn’t really offer much. The most interesting situation is that ofJudy, whose episode apparently needed to be eviscerated due to some kind of higher principle that the creator is trying to explore. So the twist, I guess, is that we lost the twist. And instead of letting the (admittedly fairly dull) people just carry the narrative, it’s full of inside-baseball, navel-gazing, meta reminders of what they’re trying to do that’s so different from other documentaries that basically go nowhere. So a lot of agonizing over principles and decisions that just aren’t very interesting at all.

I prefer to think of it as a fictional production in the style of a “Nathan for You.” Jess Shane calls it a documentary. God, I hope not because *that* would be shocking and heartbreaking. Surely it’s fictional. Surely there’s no way Radiotopia would go to the expense of producing a series with a host as clueless and dangerously absorbed by her “art” to the extent of the way she holds her power over her participants. Was this an elaborate poison pen letter to the audience for being complicit by consuming exploitative content or a documentary? I’m giving it all stars because it certainly raised unsettling questions and feelings with excellent production values and sound.