Podcast Corner: American culture looms large in this week's selections
Megan Thee Stallion is featured in the new run of Louder Than A Riot. Picture: Doug Peters/PA Wire
Season one of Louder Than a Riot (https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-40177263.html) looked at the link between rap music and incarceration in the US. It returned on March 16 with a new season beginning with the December 2022 trial of Tory Lanez, who was convicted of three felony counts after shooting rapper Megan Thee Stallion in 2020. He faces more than 20 years in prison. Louder Than a Riot season two examines who hip-hop marginalises and how ‘misogynoir’ - the specific racist misogyny against black women - is embedded into the fabric of culture.
The engrossing series Floodlines was released three years ago and examined everything around Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Expertly hosted by Vann R Newkirk II, he returns to head up Holy Week, all eight episodes of which were released on March 14. Charting the week after Martin Luther King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, it says: “Seven days diverted the course of a social revolution and set the stage for modern clashes over voting rights, red-lining, critical race theory, and the role of racial unrest in today’s post-George Floyd reckoning.”
It’s been two-and-a-half years since In The Dark’s second season ended, a three-year investigation into the incarcerated Curtis Flowers culminating in him sharing his side of the story. A brief recap: He had been tried six times for the 1996 murders of four people. Even when his convictions were reversed, Flowers stayed in jail awaiting retrials. Finally freed after 23 years, Mississippi state is to pay Flowers $50,000 a year for the next decade.
In The Dark, suffice to say, was an important player in the matter - as it says in the bio, it’s “serial investigative journalism” - so it was a surprise when the show was cancelled last summer, especially considering it was published by American Public Media. Then on March 9, ‘An Announcement’ - In The Dark is moving to the New Yorker and Conde Nast and season three is in the works. As they say in the 12-minute reveal, “In investigative work, if a story isn’t well told, you might as well not spend years with all your findings, because no one’s gonna care.”
As yet there’s no release date for the next season of In The Dark, but if there’s any show that’s worth waiting for, it’s this.
