Many people had never even heard of podcasts (Apple had just made its convenient Podcasts app a permanent feature of the iPhone home screen that fall). When Serial launched, in October 2014, nobody had heard of Syed, and his case seemed settled (he had been, after all, convicted). Serial Season 1: Adnan Syed while in high school. Maybe you came for the justice, but you stayed for things like the time Chivvis and Koenig are driving around and Chivvis says, “There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib!,” and Koenig says, “Sometimes I think Dana isn’t listening to me.” And because you heard him week after week, you felt like you got to know Syed, as you got to know what it’s like to be Koenig doing this job. After all, there was a man’s life on the line. As a postcard of a very particular and somewhat overlooked experience - an unfamous case in an unfamous place - it was just what This American Life had made its name doing but spun out at greater length, and with higher stakes. The right-a-wrong part was the hook, anyway: Who doesn’t love a whodunit? But over the course of 12 installments, Serial turned into something else: an immersive meditation on American justice, journalism, and “truth” and the fractured suburban mores of middle-class immigrant communities. Listeners would tune in weekly, was the hope, to hear updates on what Koenig and her producers, Julie Snyder and Dana Chivvis, had dug up about whether a man named Adnan Syed, who’d been sent to prison for killing his ex-girlfriend in Baltimore 15 years ago, when he was a high-school student, had actually committed the murder. But from the start, Serial was meant to be different: a single story told over time and from a number of different angles. It came from the producers of the public-radio program This American Life, who had themselves been early to podcasting (which makes sense, since it’s more or less radio-to-go). Last year, Serial was an experiment, to find out if people would do something a bit old-fashioned: tune-in-next-week-to-find-out-what-we-learned. That’s my dream world: ‘Nobody read anything, just listen to what we do and make your measured, calm judgments.’ But that’s not the world we live in, obviously.” And then, in a squeaky whisper: “ Can’t we just wait? I’ll get there, I’ll get there …” Here she drops into a patiently-explaining-teacher cadence: “ Everyone wait for us to be done. ‘Serial’ Season 2, Episode 1 Recap: Bowe Bergdahl’s Crazy Story
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