The Limetown Disappearance Gets Lost in Its TV Translation

Fifteen years ago, over 300 people suddenly disappeared from a neuroscience research facility in Tennessee and were never found. Or, so the story of Limetown goes, which began as a fiction podcast from Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie and has now made the jump to the small screen as a Facebook Watch series. Playing off of the same structure and familiar patter of a This American Life podcast, the story fittingly follows American Public Radio investigative journalist Lia Haddock (Jessica Biel) as she continues to search for the truth of what happened at Limetown, where her uncle (Stanley Tucci) also disappeared.

Limetown is a spooky puzzlebox series that sets up this strange event and introduces us to a manufactured town that housed the researchers and their families, who would also become the guinea pigs for mysterious neurological experiments. Each half-hour episode of the series (four of which were available for review) sees Lia going down the rabbit hole of what exactly those experiments were by making contact with unexpected survivors after believing that the story (and the town itself) was at a dead end.

Like a real true crime podcast, Limetown (the TV series, at least—I have not heard the podcast) features descriptions of gruesome scenes and disturbing depictions of past murders, suicide, and a current bludgeoning. A dark, simmering score heightens the creep factor as Lia is “warned off” her investigation yet pulled deeper into the horror that seems to lie behind this faux-happy town. Visiting the rotting Limetown 15 years later carries a sinister weight, as do mentions of the networks of caves below, which each house is connected to. But Lia, herself, has some secrets of her own that manifest in the sexualizing of her obsessive audiophile sensibilities.