Reed and Syed’s tumble down the rabbit hole is the stuff of John le Carré novels, and the entire experience is elevated even further by how the show integrates the dynamics of the duo’s emerging partnership both as a framing device and a way to explore deeper themes about the production of collective truth. well into the present - and even after the release of the podcast itself.

It’s a bombastically fun and mind-expanding conceit, and if you end up choosing to follow along with the subtitled version, you’ll find a fun, pulpy send-up of unsavory true-crime podcasts.Ī twisty thrill, an investigative stunner, and quite clearly Serial Productions’ best work since S-Town, The Trojan Horse Affair follows Brian Reed and Hamza Syed, a former doctor turned budding journalist, as they dive headfirst into the prevailing mysteries behind a political scandal that roiled Birmingham, England, in the early 2010s and has inflamed Islamophobic tensions throughout the U.K. As a collaboration with Italian producer Cristina Marras and an homage to the “Giallo” movie genre, part of what’s on display here are the ways the rough beats of standard true-crime or crime-fiction narratives are so pervasively familiar that almost anyone would likely be able to broadly follow along without direct knowledge of the language the story is presented in. The episode follows a true-crime podcaster as she tries to solve a series of murders, which, of course, turn out to be serial killings of true-crime podcasters, but the twist is how the work is performed entirely in Italian with the expectation that it will be principally consumed by people who don’t understand the language. The Imaginary Advice feed has long been a compelling laboratory for British writer Ross Sutherland’s various adventures in audio fiction, and with September’s “The True Crime of Your Frozen Death,” his experiment takes on big ideas about language, experience, and narrative comprehension. One has to admire the sheer confidence on display here.

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