The Serial Finale and My Ongoing Podcast App Problem

So "Serial" wrapped up last Thursday, episode 12, "What We Know," and I've been chewing on it ever since. If you've somehow missed it, Serial is the spinoff of This American Life where Sarah Koenig spends twelve episodes picking apart the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed. It became, by a wide margin, the fastest podcast to ever hit 5 million downloads and streams on iTunes, and it did that in about a month. That's not a small thing. Podcasts have been around since podcasting was a Ben Hammersley coinage back in 2004, and it took this one show to make my mom ask me what app she needs.

I'm not going to pretend the finale gave me what I wanted. Koenig doesn't land on an answer. She more or less says: I don't know, and I've spent a year on this, and I still don't know. Some people are furious about that. I get it, twelve hours of your commute for a shrug isn't nothing. But I'd rather have an honest shrug than a fake bow tied on top of a case that's genuinely murky. Real life doesn't clean up on schedule just because you've got a season finale to hit.

Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a dumb one: my podcast app situation is a mess right now and this show made it worse. I've been on Overcast since it came out over the summer, mostly for the Smart Speed feature, which trims silence out of talky shows without making anyone sound like a chipmunk. Genuinely great for something like Serial where there's a lot of dead air while Koenig thinks out loud. But Overcast doesn't have a great answer for "I want to relisten to episode 8 real quick to check a detail," and I ended up switching back and forth to the stock Podcasts app on my phone twice this month just to use its scrubbing bar, which is honestly still better for jumping around inside an episode. Neither app does everything I want. I don't need a "revolutionary" podcast app, I just want one that downloads reliably over wifi at 6am before I leave for the train and doesn't forget my place if I switch between my phone and my iPad.

The bigger thing, though, is watching people who've never listened to a podcast in their life suddenly become podcast people. A guy at work who I'm fairly sure still uses a flip phone (he doesn't, but it feels true) asked me last week which app he should download to listen to Serial on his lunch break. I told him to just use whatever came on his phone already, because arguing about podcast apps with someone who's never opened one is a great way to talk someone out of trying something new. He listened to four episodes in two days and now he's the one bringing it up at the coffee machine.

There's something almost old-fashioned about how this whole thing spread. No huge marketing budget as far as I can tell, no big platform push. Just This American Life's existing audience, then word of mouth, then that word of mouth compounding until strangers were tweeting theories about a case from fifteen years ago like it was a new episode of a network drama. Instagram just announced it's passed Twitter in monthly users this month, 300 million and change, and everyone's writing about which platform is "winning," but the thing that actually got people talking to each other in December wasn't a platform at all. It was a guy with a microphone and a story that wouldn't resolve.

No word yet on when season two is coming, or even really what it'll be about, which is its own kind of relief honestly. I don't need Koenig to rush into something just to keep the download numbers up. I'd rather wait and get something she actually believes in than get a quick follow-up that's chasing the first one's shadow. For now I'm just going to keep re-downloading episode 8 to check that timeline detail one more time, because apparently I'm not done with this yet either.