'Serial' team's seven-episode podcast is ready for binging

When the Serial team announced their new spinoff podcast called S-Town, they promised a murder investigation in rural Alabama. While that's what host Brian Reed went there to cover, somewhere along the way it turned into a treasure hunt for buried gold. Reed also ended up unraveling the mysteries of the person who called the team to his neck of the woods to investigate a wealthy man who was reportedly bragging about getting away with murder. The good news is that you won't have to wait weeks to find out how the story ends. Reed and the team have given S-Town (or Shittown as the podcast revealed) the Netflix treatment -- all seven episodes are now online and ready for binging.

We say "Netflix treatment," but S-Town executive producer Julie Snyder told Wired that the spinoff actually used novels as a model in the same way Serial used TV. "In a novel, you're entering into a hermetic world," she said. "That's what we were trying to do, that we hadn't yet done with a podcast: where you can enter their specific world, and you don't know really know what it's about or where it's going, but hopefully you're compelled to stay in it the whole time." Just don't expect to be listening to the podcast equivalent of a crime novel, because what you'll get is a Southern Gothic tale wrapped in layers of small-town mystery.