“For the last year, I’ve spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was an hour after school one day in 1999,” host Sarah Koenig begins the first episode of Season One of the almost-immediate hit podcast, “Serial.”
Finding a prominent place in pop culture and general conversation similar to that of a television show or hit movie, Season One of “Serial” investigates the 1999 murder of a Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee and the ambiguous alibi of her accused murderer and ex-boyfriend Adnan Sayed.
High school is a universal and frequently commercialized part of American growing-up, making this teenage murder story maybe a little more entertaining than it seems severe.
Although convicted of murdering Lee, Adnan Sayed remains stagnant in his claim that he did not kill her, but his story shifts throughout his multiple recounts of where he was that day.
To the Baltimore public of 1999, Sayed was a mugshot on the six o’clock news, but to the listeners of “Serial,” he is Adnan. Although one may believe he still had a hand in Lee’s murder, it is apparent that the story is much more complex than a black-and-white crime-show depiction of a boy killing his ex-girlfriend and dumping her in a park.
Koenig humanizes people who are sometimes easy to write off as either simply good or bad. There is a complexity to morality that she challenges her listeners to reconcile with, urging them to sympathize with her subjects while presenting evidence suggesting they are to not be fully trusted.
And so comes Season Two of the series, premiering in November 2015. Though it rides the wave of popularity from the first 12 episodes, this new story is much further away from its listeners’ every day lives than a high school in Baltimore County. Season 2 introduces Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter of his outpost in Afghanistan and recently released Taliban prisoner of five years. There is no murder, there is no explosion, and there is no villain or hero; this is a story of a man who believed the leadership of his post was corrupt, and so he walked away.
Multiple Colorado College students have expressed that they “lost interest in Season 2,” and that the “story was way less captivating than that of Adnan’s,” but the lack of sensationalism in Bowe Bergdahl’s story makes room for the listener’s views to be challenged. No one is going to argue that murder is bad, but what about the nature of war and the United States’ role in foreign affairs? What, if anything, merits army desertion?
Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune calls “Serial” “intimate storytelling about, ultimately, the powers and limitations of journalism,” and season 2 is just that. Perhaps it is less exciting than a murder mystery, but the challenging question “what would you do in this situation?” might be what makes people uncomfortable with this new season. Storytelling as a form of journalism is an opportunity for people to look critically at their absolutes, and to question information instead of just receiving it.
Although Season 2 of “Serial” lacks the previous season’s suspense, it brings entirely new things to this investigative series: a certain uneasiness about what the “right thing” actually is, if any good decision can be made after massively dangerous judgment, and if there is any separation at all between the listener and he who the series follows.