So This Is My Why | Issue 11

Serial – now a 4 season true-crime podcast, has long intrigued me because it was thanks to Serial that the podcast genre exploded across the USA. It was much like the Hamilton of today, where people fell crazily in love with the true-crime genre/podcast as a whole and spawned a wide range of “copycats”, despite many having never loved or even expected to love it before!

This week, I decided to finally take the plunge and listen to Season 1.

Sarah Koenig, an American journalist, public radio personality & former producer of the television and radio program This American Life, dives deep into the mysterious murder of high-school senior, Hae Min Lee, in 1999. A murder that led to the subsequent arrest and imprisonment of her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed.​

Adnan has been imprisoned for more than half of his lifetime​

It’s a rather exhaustive investigation into the community, the evidence collected, and how it had played out in court. Sarah revisits the site of where Hae’s body was found (they even count the steps it takes to reach the area from the road), has frequent calls with Adnan – snippets are included in the episodes – and also hunts down many people who are directly/indirectly related to the murder, some of whom were never interviewed by the police despite their relation to the case!

Thoughts

Coming into Serial 6 years after its release, I found the format used to be immediately familiar. But that’s also because after the success of Serial, many other podcasts decided to adopt the same narrative, investigative approach albeit arguably with less success, depth, and authority.

Many articles & podcasts have been published poking at why Serial was so successful and some key words emerged: It felt inclusive, urgent, “fun”, sensational, authoritative & sympathetic. The investigation was detailed and serialised.

And Sarah was discovering things that were inserted into episodes that were soon released, so it felt like you were part of the investigation. You discovered things as Sarah was discovering them. Not unlike what Alex Blumberg did with Gimlet’s The Startup podcast.

BUT there are criticisms too, one of the main ones being Sarah’s “white reporter privilege”: that Serial was so successful because it was told from the lens of a white journalist who entered this unique community of colour, uncovering pieces of the case in a relatable way, all while blanketed in the privilege & protection of being white. An argument that carries on to subsequent true crime episodes, where many victims are white and female.​

And finally, there remains the question: What impact did Serial actually have on Adnan’s case?