It might seem like there's an unending stream of new podcasts, between NPR's constant output and the potentially endless number of comedians hosting ironic talk series. But it actually takes some serious effort (and a little luck) to break through the pack of news hours, preexisting comedy titans, and whatever category Welcome to Night Vale belongs to that dominate the iTunes podcast charts.
Yet a brand new podcast, with no preexisting fan base, has managed just that in the past few weeks.
Limetown has been disturbing the natural order of things on the iTunes charts ever since it debuted July 29. It quickly climbed to the top of the fictional and arts podcast sections, and by September 25 it reigned as the No. 1 US podcast on iTunes. That's better than This American Life. It's better than WTF With Marc Maron. And, yes, it's better than Serial (at least until season two debuts).
Limetown hails from a completely new podcasting network called Two-Up Productions, which was created by two friends who met as film students in NYU. There have been only two episodes to date. Even Limetown’s official website is just about as bare as the ghost town that centers its mystery.
When you've got a story as weird and wonderful as Limetown's, though, it's only a matter of time before devoted fans find you.
What is Limetown?
Limetown follows an "American Public Radio" investigation into the disappearance of an entire Tennessee research facility. More than 300 people vanished from Limetown without a trace, leaving nothing so minimal as even "spit somewhere on a toothbrush" behind. Limetown was supposed to be a utopia in which neuroscientists could gather to research some mysterious greater cause, which was never shared with the public.
Instead, Limetown became just another experiment gone horribly awry.
The podcast picks up 10 years after the incident, with APR journalist Lia Haddock pursuing the questions people have been asking ever since. What happened? Where did everyone go? Are they still alive? What the hell were they up to in Limetown, anyway?
Lia herself has a connection to the town, since her uncle was one of the vanished. While she says she was not close to him — she was 17 at the time of the disappearance, and never knew him beyond seeing him in photographs — there's no doubt that this legacy will come into play over the course of her investigation.
Despite the sporadic release schedule for the first two episodes (July 29 and September 13), co-creators Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie insist they have a set plan for the season's remaining five episodes — especially now that the podcast's massive success has meant they can commit to it full time. (Bronkie says Limetown currently has "hundreds of thousands" of subscribers.)
Further, in the reality of Limetown, Lia's investigation is ongoing; every bizarre twist is breaking news for a 10-year-old cold case.
Limetown uses familiar formats to lull its audience into a false sense of security
At first, Limetown most closely resembles a combination of This American Life and Serial. Lia catches us up to speed in the first episode with news clips, 911 calls, official testimonies, and interviews from both the past and present. She is precise, inquisitive, and meticulous regarding her subject matter.
Akers told me that he and Bronkie studied NPR's format "for direction and structure for how a radio documentary sounds," more specifically mentioning This American Life and Radiolab. (When Akers and Bronkie started kicking around the idea for Limetown in the fall of 2013, Serial was still a year from its release.)
Still, both creators emphasized that they want to use these familiar, even comforting formats to explore an unusual phenomenon in a more intimate way. The bones of Limetown might have come from NPR news hours, but "classic radio dramas" provided its dramatic precedents, and "vanishing civilizations" like Roanoke and Fordlandia acted as historical references.
Fictional oral histories like World War Z inspired them to tell a sprawling story through a variety of specific perspectives. For the populace of Limetown itself, Bronkie admitted to drawing from his own experience in a particularly insular community.
"I spent the better part of 10 years immersed in the very special-tasting Kool-Aid of Silicon Valley," he said, "and there’s a certain 'for the greater good' mentality out there that creeps its way into [Limetown]."
Annie-Sage Whitehurst voices Lia as cautious but palpably excited at the prospect of uncovering something even as she can't make heads or tails of it. While Akers and Bronkie confirmed to me over email that they have planned the first season "and well beyond," Whitehurst told me she has no idea how Limetown may or may not resolve. "I'm definitely learning along with Lia," she said. "[but] I love it."
Even as Lia references official reports and interviews experts, something is always off. After all, this is a story about 300 people disappearing, out of nowhere.
The sense of unease intensifies as the pilot progresses, moving past the archived news footage to a wrenching montage of grieving family members, and finally to Lia visiting the eerily quiet town itself. The more she uncovers, the more none of it makes any sense. Witnesses emerge out of the ether with a whisper, or roaring with rage. Statements take a turn from the factual to the ethereal, citing some unknowable force no one can explain.
So while Lia starts off the podcast focused and prepared, the seemingly nonsensical evidence she uncovers gives her no choice but to throw out her original plan. Without a road map or any idea what she's wading into, she becomes a proxy for the audience, breathless with anticipation.
Suddenly, Limetown is no longer a straight investigation.
It's a ghost story.
Limetown's smartest — and riskiest — move is taking a sharp turn into science fiction
Even as the investigative format continues, shades of podcast cult favorites The Black Tapes (a scripted investigation into paranormal cold cases) and Welcome to Night Vale (a fictional series of otherworldly community news updates) start creeping in with every new and chilling piece of information Lia uncovers. This was intentional as far as Night Vale goes, as Akers cited it as the original inspiration for Limetown. "It did something that was completely new, for me at least, and bizarre," he said. "Its audio created a completely visual experience."
As soon as Lia visits Limetown, the podcast begins a shift from news clip montages to a more immersive experience. This holds especially true in Limetown's second episode, "Winona," as Lia encounters an unlikely and reluctant witness. The episode runs just over 20 minutes, but it is patient. It lingers on Lia's hesitant steps, the keys jangling in her hand, the beats between action and revelation getting longer and more unsettling. If you're listening with headphones, you just might shudder as her breath quickens in your ear.
"Winona" takes all the meticulous authenticity of Limetown's first episode and throws it out the window. This is not our world, nor is it pretending to be anymore. There is a moment when Lia's witness tells her something so unbelievable, so incredibly beyond the world we know, that the only logical response is silence.
This is the moment when Limetown reveals the bold show it wants to be. Hinting at such a huge, otherworldly mythology is a risk, as Akers and Bronkie undoubtedly know from Lost, another huge influence on Limetown. They should be able to avoid rankling sticklers for continuity, since the first season should only have seven episodes. But Limetown's greater asset is the fact that Akers and Bronkie are creating an entirely new mythology in which to play. We can theorize all we want, but if they're making up the rules, logic can only take would-be sleuths so far.
Limetown found success by tapping into one of the most addictive aspects of entertainment: a mystery
When Serial was released last October, it became a sensation. I don’t mean it was big; I mean it was huge.
It was the fastest podcast to ever reach 25 million downloads, and went on to hit 40 million by December. Talking about Serial meant trying to parse the details of a thorny case, and millions of aspiring detectives eagerly took up the cause on the internet and with their friends alike. It was sometimes easy to forget that this was a real mystery involving people rather than characters.
It’s not that mysteries are a new pop culture phenomenon, of course. Procedurals and thrillers have dominated television for decades, and as Bronkie and Akers identified, those were preceded by mystery-driven radio dramas. The only properties to sell more than Agatha Christie’s estimated 2 to 4 billion books are William Shakespeare and the Bible — and Shakespeare needs to watch his back.
But mysteries, and cold cases in particular, have undoubtedly seen a resurgence in the past couple of years alone. After Serial, there was the literally titled Mystery Show, this year’s surprise podcast hit from This American Life’s Starlee Kine. And don't forget The Jinx, HBO’s six-part documentary exploration of the bizarre Robert Durst case that has never formally been solved. (Revelations from the documentary partially led to Durst being charged with murder. He is now awaiting trial.)
Unlike Limetown, these examples draw from real-life mysteries. But Limetown has its fictional counterparts as well. There’s The X-Files, the supernatural crime show set to return in January 2016, and How to Get Away With Murder, the latest show from Shonda Rhimes’s production company/empire that spent its entire season solving a single murder.
Even closer to Limetown is The Leftovers, HBO’s adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s novel (from Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof) about the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of more than 140 million people. On that show, too, weirdness reigns and answers prove elusive.
The difference that made Limetown skyrocket
The lion's share of this new wave of crime dramas tends to luxuriate in the unknown. These shows present evidence and hint at solutions, but ultimately let their audiences fill in the blanks.
Involving others in the mysteries — and letting them think they have a shot at solving them — creates a more intimate, interactive, and, ultimately, exciting experience. It’s one thing to tune into pop culture as a means of tuning out from daily life, and quite another to actively engage with it as imagining solutions to a mystery demands.
Limetown has found a way to break into a saturated market by setting up a mystery that inextricably ties the compelling mundanity of true crime to the eerie possibilities of science fiction. The unsettling world in which an entire town vanished lies parallel to ours, a mirror image that looks the same, even though it’s completely flipped around.
The kicker is that none of it makes sense, and none of it's supposed to. A news clip will sound like any nightly report until some fractured, otherworldly detail comes screeching into focus, and all you can do is blink at it and go, "What the hell was that?" Like Lost before it, Limetown takes care to drop clues, and very specific ones at that, but there truly may be no solving the mystery until Limetown does it for you.
Until then, the possibilities are endless — and endlessly fun to contemplate.
Until Limetown gives some concrete answers, there will always be questions — which is exactly what it wants
(All ye who have listened to Limetown, proceed for fan theories. Those who have not and would like to stay surprised should only come back to this space afterward.)
Once the internet was convinced that Limetown is indeed fictional, the fan theories took off in earnest, especially surrounding the second episode's sharp turn into something possibly supernatural. "Winona," so named for the first Limetown witness Lia ends up interviewing, takes the routine investigation and makes us question the logic of Limetown's world.
Reddit is always good for some fan theories, and the same holds true for Limetown after even just a couple episodes.
Redditor deeleybopper1 suggests that everyone who lived in Limetown was brought into a hive mind, "maybe through a device of some sort? Like a geo-based 'if you're within range, you'll be part of the hive mind' machine..." Elsewhere, _Diren_ wonders if it's significant that the name "Winona" has Native American roots, spurring a discussion on vision quests and thought projection. Some, like our own culture editor, Todd VanDerWerff, believe Lia feels compelled to tell Limetown's story because she was, in fact, a citizen of Limetown herself.
The most intensive theories revolve around the caves that lie beneath Limetown and the dry rot Lia encounters when she visits. Jtapp66 muses, "They spent exorbitant amounts of money, but the houses were shoddy. It almost seems as if they were cutting costs to divert funding to ... some thing else. Also linked, I think, to the 911 call [from episode 1]. Specifically, 'Shut it off.'" Glowcat counters by saying the dry rot was being deliberately funneled into the caves as "an energy source," and still others say the dry rot proves that the founders of Limetown knew the housing would be temporary.
But the most telling theory comes from user puck04, who says all these theories probably don't mean anything; the dry rot is probably just "a metaphor for the demise of Limetown." In a mystery that is so open-ended, so mysterious, so willing to go dark and truly weird, a detail like dry rot could mean everything — or it could mean nothing at all.