"This is a unicorn of a series...a wonderful example of immersion journalism in a community I didn't know I needed to go. The style and the voice are truly unique."

- Samantha Hodder, Bingeworthy

Cement City is a quietly gripping immersion into small‑town America, where two journalists, Jeanne Marie Laskas and Erin Anderson, move into a concrete‑block house in Donora, PA, and stay for three years. What starts as a curiosity—“What’s it like to live here?”—becomes an intimate chronicle of a Rust Belt community straining under economic collapse, environmental neglect, and civic fatigue.

Through ten episodes that unfold like chapters in a novel, Cement City delves into local elections, smog‑soaked nostalgia, scandal, and the ragged hopes of residents determined to revive their town. Laskas and Anderson resist sensationalism, instead letting the voice of the place emerge through council meetings, barroom confidences, and the daily grit of survival. The result is both anthropological and elegiac: an elegy for post‑industrial decline, and a testament to the stubbornness of community. It’s journalism as sociology, told with warmth, wit, and moral reflection—echoing Our Town in its reverence for the ordinary and its conviction that every place, no matter how forgotten, has a story worth telling.