It’s hard to say what, exactly, made “Serial,” the breakaway podcast about an old murder, so addictive.
We live in an era of dwindling attention spans, deceptively peddled news items known in the industry as “click bait,” and mind-numbing shouting matches on cable news. So a long form, meticulously reported series about a murder in 1999 that generated modest news coverage at the time seemed like a questionable venture.
“The blank looks on people’s faces when we told them what we were doing,” the executive producer of the series, Julie Snyder, recalled in a recent interview, describing her angst during the days before the show debuted. “I thought: Oh my God. This is a huge mistake.”
This 12-episode audio series, financed with a small budget and produced largely out of a makeshift home studio, has already had more than 68 million downloads. It is by far the biggest hit in the relatively brief history of podcasts, a medium that has surged in popularity as people increasingly turn to smartphones for news and entertainment.
As a notable number of veteran public-radio journalists have left stable jobs to work on podcasts, the rising appeal of this format has sparked anxiety about the future of traditional radio. The creators of “Serial,” a spinoff of “This American Life,” the popular weekly radio show, say they’re not quite sure what to make of their success.
But it seems to me the reasons for the phenomenal success of “Serial” lie in its willingness to defy some of the worst trends in journalism. The freewheeling format should encourage journalists and other nonfiction writers to think differently about storytelling.
Of course, the subject of this nearly nine-hour-long series lent itself perfectly to obsession. Sarah Koenig, the creator and host, found a gripping story hiding in plain sight: the murder of Hae Min Lee, a high school student in Baltimore County who vanished after leaving campus on the afternoon of Jan. 13, 1999. After police officers found her body in a seedy park weeks later, an ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, an American-born 17-year-old from a Pakistani immigrant family, was charged with first-degree murder.
Relying mainly on the testimony of a man who told the police he had helped Mr. Syed bury the body, prosecutors easily persuaded a jury to convict Mr. Syed in just two hours of deliberations after a trial of nearly six weeks. Mr. Syed, who has always maintained his innocence, is serving a life sentence. This story was not about a cold case but about a murder that was legally solved.
Yet Ms. Koenig’s deep, nuanced, shoe-leather reporting found many mysteries and unanswerable questions, including among the main players and even those on the periphery. She took something that seemed to be open and shut and revealed its ambiguity and faults. And she presented it in a form that was strikingly casual, immersive and transparent, which at times even felt voyeuristic.
As she examines in excruciating detail the case against Mr. Syed, listeners are privy to her frustrations, doubts and random thoughts about the case. She sighs at times, tosses expletives and shares her own confusion. Recorded conversations with key players come across as casual chats rather than interviews. Listening to her is like hearing a riveting story from a close friend over drinks, a remarkable illusion that Ms. Koenig says took even her by surprise when fans of the series started emailing and calling her at home.
“There’s this thing where they assume we’re friends,” she said recently. “People feel like they know me.”
As the series progresses, listeners become deeply invested in the question that Ms. Koenig sets out to answer: whether Mr. Syed is innocent. I spoke to some people who found the series exploitive because it opened old wounds and turned private lives into the subject of global, frenzied speculation.
But I felt that any such effect was offset by how powerfully the series illuminated the complexities of the criminal justice system. In offering up the possibility that Mr. Syed may have been wrongly convicted, Ms. Koenig does not portray the police officers, the prosecutors or the defense attorney in a heavy-handed way. The subjects, including Mr. Syed, are vividly fleshed out and memorable. For the most part, they all seem to get to tell their side of the story.
Last week, a Maryland appeals court agreed to hold a hearing to explore whether Mr. Syed’s trial lawyer was ineffective, an effort that was in motion before the series began but may be bolstered by some of the facts Ms. Koenig uncovered. A separate team of lawyers who specialize in wrongful convictions reviewed the case after learning about it from the program’s producers and hopes to persuade a Maryland judge to order that DNA evidence from the case be tested, in case it points to a different suspect.
While both efforts are long shots, if a new trial does lead to an acquittal, “Serial” may have played a game-changing role in a case that was regarded as closed.
The series has set impossibly high expectations for a second season, which is expected to begin this fall. It is the most downloaded podcast on iTunes, with roughly 5.7 million listeners per episode. By comparison, the average download rate for the next 20 most popular podcasts is 446,000 per episode, according to Mark McCrery, the head of Podtrac, which monitors podcast traffic.
“No one thought ‘Serial’ would be as popular,” he said. “Bringing mysteries to podcasts is not something that has been done before in this way. But mysteries are very popular in other media.”
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