So Serial ended on Thursday and I've been chewing on it for two days now instead of doing anything productive.
If you haven't been following along (where have you been, honestly), Serial is the podcast spinoff of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig, that spent twelve episodes picking apart the 1999 murder of a Baltimore high schooler named Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. I started it back in October because a coworker wouldn't shut up about it, and by episode three I was hooked in a way I haven't been hooked on anything audio since I was a kid falling asleep to old radio drama reruns my dad had on cassette.
Episode twelve, "What We Know," dropped Thursday morning and I listened to the whole thing on my walk to the train, which meant I showed up to the office looking like I'd just heard bad news, because in a way I had. Koenig basically tells you upfront she's not going to give you a verdict. Twelve episodes of building a case, of cell tower records and Best Buy payphones and a guy named Jay whose story keeps shifting, and the ending is her sitting with her own uncertainty out loud on tape. No tidy bow. If this were a network true crime special they'd have manufactured a twist for the last ten minutes. Instead you get a journalist admitting she doesn't know, and somehow that's more honest than any ending I've heard on anything this year.
I'll admit my first reaction, right there on the platform waiting for the 8:14, was annoyance. I wanted an answer. I think most people did — Reddit had an entire subforum going by episode four trying to solve it like a crossword, complete with amateur cell-tower analysis and a guy who mapped Adnan's supposed route to the Best Buy on Google Maps at like 11pm on a Tuesday. That's the thing that's stuck with me more than the case itself honestly. A podcast, a genuinely niche format that most of my non-tech friends still don't know how to subscribe to, turned into this shared cultural event that people were discussing at lunch the same way they'd discuss a season finale of a network drama. It's the first time I've seen a podcast do that. Not close, either.
Some of that is just Koenig being a phenomenal writer and interviewer, and some of it is the format itself doing something a weekly hour-long TV show can't. You're not watching this happen at a screen at 9pm on a Thursday. You're in her head, in your earbuds, on your commute or doing dishes or whatever, for weeks. It's intimate in a way that snuck up on me. I use Overcast to listen to most of my stuff these days (Marco Arment's app, been using it since it came out over the summer, and the smart speed feature alone is worth the four bucks even if half the internet has already written the definitive review of it), and Serial is the first show where I actively slowed playback back down to normal speed because I didn't want to miss a word. That never happens. I speed through nearly everything at 1.5x now out of habit.
Anyway. The internet's obviously spending most of its attention this week on the Sony mess and the theater chains pulling The Interview, which, fine, that's the bigger story by any measure and I don't have much to add to that pile that twenty other blogs haven't already said better. But Serial is the thing that actually changed how I think about a medium this month, so that's what I wanted to write about instead.
There's apparently a second season being discussed already, which is either exciting or a little bit of a letdown depending on how attached you got to this specific unresolved mess of a case. I keep going back and forth. Part of me wants Koenig to spend a full season on something with an actual resolution just so I can feel like the twelve hours I put into this one paid off in some concrete way. The other part of me knows that's not really what the show is about, and if it wrapped up neat I probably wouldn't still be thinking about it on a Saturday morning two days later, coffee going cold, typing this instead of doing the laundry that's been sitting in the dryer since Wednesday.