While true crime podcasts have become entrenched in our modern culture over the past decade following the popularity of Serial, one podcast, in particular, isn’t just obsessed with the intricate details and subject matter — it includes the real-life detectives who’ve worked on the cases. Serving as both entertainment and information, true crime has captured the attention of audiences in a myriad of ways, but Small Town Dicks sets itself apart to guide us through stories of Small Town, USA with detectives who first broke the case. Alongside real accounts, suspect interviews and 9-1-1 calls, Small Town Dicks is anchored by identical-twin detectives Dan and Dave and hosted by the iconic voice of Lisa Simpson on The Simpsons, Yeardley Smith.
In an exclusive with PopCulture.com ahead of the Small Town Dicks milestone Season 10 premiere this April, Smith admits after 10 seasons, her perception of law enforcement and policing, in general, has somewhat changed. “I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned about the really strict parameters that law enforcement has to operate between in order to do the job correctly. Obviously, there are bad actors in every profession and particularly in law enforcement where they’re really held to a higher standard because they must be,” she told PopCulture. “When you have people who smear the profession, it’s deeply painful to detectives who are really trying to do it the right way. But we’ve actually had conversations on Small Town Dicks about the George Floyd murder, about what it means to defund the police, about how you find middle ground and do some real reform without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”
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With the show being one of the more well-researched podcasts out there covering the true crime genre that is detective-driven, it’s no secret the subject matter could be much darker. But Small Town Dicks manages to make its program a lot more “reverent podcast towards the victims,” according to the Emmy Award-winning actress. “The title of the podcast is sort of funny, Small Town Dicks, but it belies a real reverence for the gravity of the situations that we’re discussing and it’s just fascinating to see how all of the dominoes need to line up quite perfectly in order for justice to be served.”
Through Smith’s hosting also serving as the audience, the joy of Small Town Dicks is how listeners and fans can also be, as the actress and host states, the detective who gathered all the evidence, brought it to the District Attorney, and then for some reason, the DA still doesn’t file. “I think it’s a very granular window into the world of how complicated this job is and really also how narrow,” she said. “The police aren’t there to judge the suspect, they’re there to gather the evidence and then they pass it off to the next department, which is the justice system. It’s been such an education for me. I’ve always admired law enforcement anyway so it wasn’t a huge shift, but I really have loved the inside baseball sort of view of it.”
Stating how the podcast works as well as it does thanks to it coming straight from the source and told by the detectives who investigated the cases, Smith says the mass fascination in true crime heard in podcasts and seen on numerous TV shows isn’t something new for audiences. “I think all of our even fables and the old Greek myths and everything, people want the good guys to win,” she said. “I think even as we’re having a really introspective moment with law enforcement, which I think is so valid and necessary, I still think that people want the good guys to win and we want law enforcement to be the good guys. I mean, honestly, no matter what you think about your local police department, if you’re in trouble, I guarantee you’re calling 9-1-1. So you want to know that if society, if people in society, are going to take the train off the tracks that there’s another whole group of people in society who are willing to put that train back on the track.”
Engaged to Detective Dan and gearing up to walk down the aisle very soon, Smith says the weight of their jobs came into perspective for her when the twins said a lot of their work was about encountering people on their worst day. “When you frame it like that, I think it gives you some notion anyway as to the amount of stress and the amount of sort of de-escalation, constant de-escalation, that the job requires. But all of it shocks me. I couldn’t do that,” she said.
Featuring a diverse amount of episodes on Small Town Dicks, Smith adds how a podcast like hers, which began in 2017, enlightens listeners about the genre and policing in general through the sheer significance of its sources sharing firsthand accounts. “I think it’s always really valuable to hear the account of something from the source rather than detectives Dan and Dave tell me about the case and then I would relate it to the audience. It would be an entirely different experience. I think not nearly as, obviously, not as authentic. Not nearly as valid in many ways because I couldn’t speak to any of the nuances because I haven’t had the experiences,” she said. “I do think that if you like true crime, especially in the podcast space, it’s much rarer to have those stories told by the detectives. You have more of that in the television space, but we’re sort of unique in the podcast space.”
Further stating how a lot of true crime podcasts are “opinion,” Smith says she hopes it’s nice for listeners to hear it from someone actually in the thick of it. “It’s just a front perspective, which I think is really valuable and necessary, particularly when in the news and on TV you get maybe 3% of the actual story because somebody else, again, is relating it to a broader picture.”
Small Town Dicks is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. For further information on the series, visit their official website. For more with Yeardley Smith and all her projects, keep it locked to PopCulture.com for the latest.
