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In 2015, a fictional podcast called Limetown became a big hit; in the podcast, American Public Radio journalist Lia Haddock investigates what happened to the 326 people living in the experimental town of Limetown, Tenn., including her uncle. Now, Facebook Watch has made the podcast into a TV show. Is it different? Read on for more…
LIMETOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman looks in the mirror of her hotel room and stretches after a long day. All of a sudden she hears a man screaming and banging his head on her door.
The Gist: Eight days earlier, we see Lia Haddock (Jessica Biel) doing vocal exercises before recording a podcast segment. She’s a reporter for American Public Radio, and she’s been reporting on the disappearance of all 300-plus residents of Limetown, Tennessee, back in 2004. Limetown was an experiment, a planned town that was set up to be a neurological study, led by Dr. Oskar Totem (Alessandro Juliani). But a year after it opened, the entire population disappeared, except for Dr. Totem, whose scorched skeleton was found tied to a light post as if he was crucified.
Lia’s boss, Gina Purri (Sherri Saum), thinks Lia isn’t adding anything to the story, since she hasn’t found any evidence of survivors. She thinks Lia should take a personal angle, since her uncle Emile (Stanley Tucci) was one of the residents that disappeared. Lia used to be close to her uncle, who comforted her when her parents fought, but she hadn’t really seen him since she was a little girl, close to 30 years ago. Gina pairs Lia with a new reporter, Mark (Omar Elba), to wrap things up.
But Lia needs more info, so she goes into the abandoned town with a reporter (Ben Cotton) who was the only journalist there when the town was dedicated. She sees how normal everything looked, and the weird tunnels that were under the town. But he warns her that at this point she needs to let go.
That is, of course, until she gets word that an actual survivor is willing to talk. Lia drills herself on who lived there so she could figure out who it might be from certain clues. The woman, Winona (Kelly Jenrette), is belligerent and has a spotty memory, so she reads from a script she wrote. We flash back to when she entered the town with her boyfriend. She tells Lia how she had to abandon her 7-year-old daughter at some point, to which Lia, whose mother left her and her sister when they were teenagers, says “how could any mother do that?” Before Winona kicks her out, though, she gives her the name of another survivor in Rake, Wyoming.
Our Take: Limetown is a TV version of the popular fictional podcast of the same name, and that podcast’s producing team, Zack Ankers and Skip Bronke, are the creators of the streaming version. We’re taking the first two half-hour episodes, which both premiere on October 16, as one episode because that’s the way they’re more or less structured.
It’s interesting that, instead of a fictionalization of a true-life podcast, this is actually the visualization of a podcast that’s already fiction. The primary characters are the same, the situation is the same. There are more secondary characters in the TV series, and the flashbacks we see of Lia’s childhood can likely be linked to the prequel novel written by Cote Smith. It’s definitely an experiment for Facebook; can a TV version of a popular podcast achieve an even wider audience telling the same story, especially if famous faces like Biel and Tucci are attached?
We didn’t catch the Limetown podcast, which is probably a good thing. It allows us to watch the series with an open mind, and we like what we see. Biel proved in The Sinner she can play disaffected characters that are colored by their pasts, and Lia has that in spades. We see her determination to find out what happened to her uncle Emile and the rest of the people of Limetown, especially when she presses the lead agent (John Beasley) on the case to talk about what he found. Tucci, of course, is superb as usual as the gentle but mysterious Emile.
Some of what we saw seemed to be a bit affected, like seeing Lia hold her microphone out no matter where she went; yes, we know podcasters have their Zoom recorders and their mics, but they also know when to not be so intrusive. And, of course, showing Lia with no life beyond her job and this story is a pet peeve of ours when it comes to depictions of journalists. But there was certainly more than enough to keep us watching.
Sex and Skin: Not that kind of show.
Parting Shot: We go back to the hotel room and hearing the man banging his head on the door, saying “this is your first warning!” After it stops, she opens the door to see a huge spot of blood. But the man is nowhere to be found.
Sleeper Star: Vera Fredrickson as the young Lia is pretty good, especially when she records her “radio show” interview with Uncle Emile on her tape recorder.
Most Pilot-y Line: Lia tells Mark when he’s assigned to her and starts talking about a movie about alien lifeforms as an explanation for the Limetown disappearances, “Stop. Know more than me by tomorrow.” She’s not going to take any guff from a kid reporter!
Our Call: STREAM IT. Limetown is watchable due to the performances of Biel and Tucci, and it seems to cover a little more ground than the original podcast. But we wonder if the scare factor is higher when you can’t see what’s going on.
Your Call:
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, FastCompany.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.
