Cement City: The Audio Equivalent Of On All Fours

A Review of Cement City, an Audacy Original podcast written and hosted by Jeanne Marie Laskas, created with Erin Anderson

Nov 14, 2024

It was a planes, trains and automobiles kind of travel day from where I live in Toronto, heading to Richmond, VA for Resonate. When I finally sat down, I hit play on Cement City, a unicorn of a series: it’s a limited-run 10-episode documentary series from Audacy. Hosted by award-winning author Jeanne Marie Laskas, she and collaborator Erin Anderson embedded in a dying town in the heart of the Rust Belt—Donora, PA; a town with a history of deaths due to smog, which un-ironically later became directly responsible for the founding of The Clean Air Act.

Cement City is the audio equivalent of On All Fours. Not so much the torrid hotel room affair with a younger man part…more the falling in love with a Rust Belt Town you never thought you would.

Instead of lavishly decorating a hotel room she planned to secretly live in for just a few weeks, Jeanne Marie Laskas bought a house. An actual house, in Donora, PA, just about a half hour from where she actually lives. She and her microphone-wielding producer Erin Anderson would base out of here for the next three years, to get to know this town from the inside out. From there, a series was born.

Two weeks earlier

I had received a frantic text message from

Lauren Passell

asking me if I had listened to Cement City yet. Because, she really needed to talk to someone about it, critic-wise. Soon, Lauren and I pulled up bar stools beside each other to dig into what this series was, what attracted and repelled each of us about it, what lingers, what leaves. There’s nothing better than two podcast nerds digging into details over a negroni.

I put Cement City in my listening queue for the travel day knowing that it would catch me at my optimal listening time. Me finally resting, sitting with my eyes closed, the frantic rush of departure behind me. Me ready to be transported, ready for a series to make everything around me melt away. Me, ears primed and looking for a new thing, a new take, a new series to be engrossed by.

It sounds quite needy when I write it like this, me, me, me. But this is a snapshot of what podcast listening is all about: Inside those noise-cancelling earphones, nothing else need exist. It’s Me-Time, if and when you can make space for it.

It was late-October, and like an offering from the gods, Cement City is a great political allegory. But this one is about a mayoral race in Donora, PA; a town that has no schools, no banks and no gas station. What does democracy look like in a place like this? Where is the magic that holds its resident population of 4,650 in place? Why does Donora have a Smog Museum…and who are the people that keep this town alive?

Episode 1 opens with Laskas, her husband, and their realtor, touring a house that she wants to buy

Laskas asks: You know those dying towns you drive by on the highway? Have you ever wondered what might happen if instead of just driving by, you actually stopped, and stayed a while?

But Laskas moves that needle further. She doesn’t just stop for a burger and gas; she buys the house. Not because she needed a house; she had one of those, fully stocked with a family, pets and farm animals. This is a different kind of house. It’s the kind you buy because you can, like a hobby, or a curiosity shop, on Main Street of some unusual town.

This admission makes it a tricky conceit to include in this series, right off the top. Because if you’re curious about some town in the middle of the Rust Belt, which is largely an economically challenged area, and you can swing through that town and snap up an entire house, are you in a position to determine what makes this town click, why people don’t leave this town, what keeps places like this alive?

Before you come to a conclusion about how, or why, this series is uppity, or offensive, as though she could hear you ask the question, Laskas tears it down for you:

[LASKAS]: “When I was a little kid, my mom asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
And I told her I wanted to be a stranger.
I'm not sure I knew what I meant, but I know I meant something.
It wasn't until years later that it would click.
I was 23 years old, and I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write about.”

Once you understand her ambition to become a stranger—a wonderful goal for adulthood—you will see that this comes to fruition with her arrival in Donora. She arrives as a stranger, but leaves a neighbour; a townsperson who cares about the local mayoral race and who won the seat on the Sewage Board.

At first, you wonder if she has a chip on her shoulder, or if she stays to feel better about herself. By the end, you realize she has fallen for this place and its eclectic population of folks. This becomes the first delight of the series, watching someone fall in love.

What is it about this place that makes them stay, to play out this audacious experiment?

What gives this series an edge, and takes the rest of the 10 episodes to sand that down to the grain, is that what seems implausible at the outset, feels entirely reasonable, or normal, by the end. Of course, you need to live in a place to actually understand it. Of course, there is corruption and collusion in municipal elections. Certainly, the holiday events will be fully attended. Definitely the kids are up to no-good.

By the end, you also feel like you’ve spent time in Donora, PA. Because you have…the series weighs in close to nine hours, longer than a unionized work day. It’s worth the stay.

Laskas manages to pull off a hat trick in this series where she is omniscient narrator, interviewer, and character in her own story. But not in a way that she resorts to talking about herself in the third person. This is all achieved with pacing and character development that’s unusually good.

I caught myself asking myself: am I guilty for enjoying it this much? Truly, I didn’t know I was this curious about what makes a dying small town stay alive. Was voyeurism that glued me to this series? I remembered back to 1980s adventure travel magazines that showed glossy photos of Indigenous tribal members in various far-flung corners of the world. I couldn’t get enough of them. I would sit and dream that I too would one day meet these people, inside a thatched hut, somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Amazon basin. It never went, but just looking at these glossy, intrusive, National Geographic-style photos satiated my wanderlust.

Was this the same thing, except now it’s about meeting normal folks in a down-on-its-luck small town in Middle America?

And here I was, sucked in. I imagined myself sitting next to them at the Cro Club downing beers, going for another round of duckpin bowling, and which mayoral candidate I might vote for. I’ve never wanted to linger in the towns off the Turn Pike, so why was I suddenly wishing that I lived in a place like Donora, some small town that spent weeks getting ready for Twinkle Bright Night?

I know the answer to my question

The craft of this series is impeccable. It offers you high-minded thoughts to ponder over, it stumbles over odd coincidences, and with dark comedic tones, it exposes the pink belly of the underdog.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the timing and the candor of the narration perfectly timed to the beat of the scene tape, with small references and character moments that peak out of the corners of the moment. It’s almost like you can see the conductor on the podium cueing the violins with a downscoop of the left arm. I suppose that with more than 850 hours of tape (!!) there was a wide range of options to choose from. But matching the tape to the narration, and timing it to sound like a symphony? That’s the work.

The timing, and especially the pacing, of the narrated portions, ducked and woven with perfection. It’s intuitive and catchy. The writing is flawless—I guffawed and snorted at times, so funny. Other times I smiled with that look of ‘knowing.’ The sound design allows for a sense of atmosphere, and the packing of the story offers the slate of characters to be developed from bit parts to new mayoral candidates (even if you can’t really remember their names or keep their campaign platforms straight).

Sometimes a scene closed and it was allowed enough time to dissolve that I would pick up my phone to see if the file had cut out by accident. Not an accident; this was to allow space for digestion and thought. Episode 4 had film-level emotional manipulation. By then, I was all in.

At the end of each episode, a new track of music would walk you out. At first, it would play over the credits, but then it was left to run. And each time I would feel like I was in a movie theatre, watching the credits roll on the screen, giving everyone a moment to collect themselves in the theatre. It was a series that wasn’t in a rush and gave space where you needed it.

On the one hand, Cement City is strikingly original….but on the other hand, it owes a great deal to an older This American Life-style, especially in the way that the narrative story is the additional layer, the icing on this delicious cake, and that person discovers something novel, which will likely make you feel good.

Maybe you can’t see a small town—like Donora—in such a big way if you’re from there. Perhaps the outside eye enables the magic to be unearthed and celebrated.

Most series don’t work for my “Me Time”

True crime about a murdered woman takes the joy out of it. While I do enjoy thought essays and deep dives into history, a concept, or politics of the moment… it’s not for Me Time.

I’ve tried this before; to cue up a series when I’m ready to feel a pulse of life going through my veins which is not my own. It doesn’t always work. This series delivered.

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