I'm listening to the new podcast "S-Town."

All 7 episodes of "S-Town" (AKA "Shit Town") became available at once — here —  and that makes it difficult to have a discussion. It's not like "Serial," where you'd get one episode a week and could bandy about all your theories and opinions while waiting for the next episode to come out.

I'm in the middle of episode 4 right now, so I'm not sure who I can talk to. I don't want spoilers. I had a good discussion yesterday with someone who was ahead of me in the episodes but being very careful not to say anything revealing, even to react one way or another to my ideas about what I thought would happen. He stressed that I shouldn't read anything about it, and I was all I know, I won't.

But it does make me feel that I need to rush through, so the experience is not spoiled, so I get the artful roll-out of the story as it was intended. I think I'd prefer to get it week by week and to have an opportunity to discuss one episode at a time — as I mostly did with "Serial."

Now, part of what I find myself thinking about is why they chose to dump the whole thing at once, and that's coloring my experience of it. Perhaps they wanted to control the storytelling, and if they restricted the flow, key information would come out in news and social media anyway. The story would be told in any crude, blunt way that anybody who could scoop them chose.

But I'm also thinking that the whole enterprise is exploitative of real people, and episode-by-episode discussion in social media might have questioned the ethics and got some serious antagonism going against the show. Dropping the whole thing at once gets ahead of that phenomenon.

I'll have more to say about exploitation and ethics when I'm finished with the whole show. It's quite interesting and elegantly crafted. The aural art is equal to the visual art which you can see at the link. You might want to get going listening to this thing so you'll be in a position to talk about it with me when I'm ready, which will be soon. Until then, I'm not reading any articles, and I won't be reading the comments to this thread — so go ahead and say anything you like.

UPDATE: Since finishing the post, I've made it to the end, beyond spoiling. Quite an amazing work of art.