Have you listened to the "Dirty John" podcast?

I listened to the entire 6-part series over the weekend (and listened to parts of it twice). It's very good, not as good as "S-Town," but definitely worthwhile, especially if you want to expose yourself to the thought processes of a woman — a successful businesswoman — who becomes inexplicably stupid while in love (and a second woman whose religion takes her to a mindboggling level of forgiveness).

Subscribe to the podcast in the normal way or start here at the L.A. Times where you can play the audio (highly recommended) or have a reading experience (with photographs).

In "'Dirty John': Journalism as Noir Entertainment" (New Yorker)("mild spoilers"), Sarah Larson questions the mixing of journalism with entertainment — the "pulp-like tone":

John is shown to be thoroughly evil—a descriptor used by several interviewees—and the story freely presents him as a monster. It does this journalistically, through legal documentation, jail records, first-person accounts, archival recordings, text messages, restraining orders, and so on. But it also does so narratively, with the kind of language we might hear in [the old radio melodrama] “Leiningen Versus the Ants.” [Veteran newspaper journalist Christopher] Goffard seems to encourage an almost mythical impression of his subject’s evil. At one point, Goffard tells a lawyer that the lawyer’s description of John sounds “almost like the opposite of a religious experience, you know, where you meet someone holy and it changes your life? This is sort of the inverse of that. Like you looked into a void.” “That is so true,” the lawyer says, with emotion. “Because we all—we don’t want to believe the really bad things about people. We just don’t. We want to think that people are good. And when you meet somebody like this, and you realize, ‘I am sitting here in the presence of evil incarnate,’ you know that people like him really do exist.”...

At Vulture,  Nicholas Quah is more critical "Dirty John Is a Stunning Story, But Why Is It a Podcast?"

The podcast is a crude construction, and its choices often come to the detriment of the actual narrative it’s trying to unfurl and ideas it’s itching to explore. Which is a damn shame, because the Dirty John story, as reported by Los Angeles Times reporter Christopher Goffard in a six-part written feature, is a stunner. If you were to give up on the podcast midway through its first episode and switch over to the feature, you’d find a deep, complex tale of domestic abuse and psychological violence that’s rigorously reported, deftly written, and smartly laid out....

I got a lot out of hearing the voices of the characters, but I wanted more psychological depth. A man was evil — some people are just evil, we're told, and there's no explanation. You might as well say his skull was full of "green worms" (somebody says, near the end). As for the woman who took him in and took him back repeatedly, she's treated with such respect as The Victim that there's no exploration of the part of the story that would make some sense of her awful choices: profound sexual desire and satisfaction.