"Serial" is a new podcast from Sarah Koenig and creators of "This American Life" - a famous radio show on NPR.
Serial has just completed its first season of 12 episodes and is widely considered as the first major hit for the podcasting medium. Unfortunately, Season 1 is a long, winding, often tiresome road that ultimately leaves you not far from where you begin. It is mostly so because the story, while intriguing, just doesn't have enough to last 10 hours. Sarah Koenig is excellent as a narrator but perhaps needed much better editing.
The story voices an important question about our justice system where the goal isn’t to arrive at the truth but to convince a jury - one way or another. The question isn’t whether - someone is innocent or guilty - but - do we have enough to acquit or to convict? It is an important difference that makes the system faster but also extremely error-prone.
This is the story of one Adnan Sayed, a 17-year old kid in Maryland who is accused of and convicted of killing his Korean ex-girl-friend, Hae Min Lee on the afternoon of January 13, 1999. Yes, 15 years ago. Adnan has been in prison for life for almost a decade for a crime that he has insisted that he didn’t commit.
The evidence against Adnan can be described as weak. However, the state has a key witness that said he helped Adnan bury Hae’s body. While he appears unreliable as a witness, his story is still a bit more put together than Adnan’s. Sarah Koenig presumably spent a year digging into every conceivable detail in the case and finally produced the 12-episode podcast lasting over 10 hours.
Adnan’s story is certainly interesting and it is hard to really understand what happened given the number of characters involved and specially given the number of years already gone by. However, there just isn’t enough revelation in the 10 hours of the podcast to justify the time spent hearing it. Instead of 12 50-minute episodes, 7 30-minute episodes would have made far more sense and would’ve kept the story a lot tighter than it has ended up being.
Sarah Koenig, who is absolutely brilliant, as a narrator, and her team do a remarkable job of researching and reporting on Adnan’s case. The website they've put together, is fantastic. However, don’t really uncover enough material to keep the story entertaining for so long. Sarah leads you on, almost convincing you to bear with her for a little while as she preps for that big reveal. You can almost hear through her mask but she is so incredibly believable and you keep going on.
Podcasts like Serial are in general a really thing good for the fledgling medium. Unfortunately, episode 1 doesn’t really have enough to be more than that. I wish it just did a bit more for us as listeners. I wish it valued our time a bit more than it does now.