Serial

I’ve been streaming kind of a lot of kind of good and bad TV lately (Homeland, The 100) – but the new media that I have to tell you about is a podcast called Serial (http://serialpodcast.org/).

I binge-listened to the first six episodes of it inside of a day and half, so I’ll have to wait until Thursday for more.  In the meantime, maybe I can get you hooked on it as well.

This WBEZ Chicago production investigates the case of Adnan Syed, a man who claims that he has been wrongfully convicted for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his high school girlfriend in 1999.  The storytelling is top-notch, borrowing a tone that’s familiar from This American Life.

Serial is engaging because its host, Sarah Koenig, compels us to judge the credibility and relevance of numerous testimonies – some from the courtroom and many more from other sources.  Koenig’s plainspoken narrative is especially compelling because it never insults the audience’s intelligence.  This program demands its audience to listen critically while contemplating how legal discourse produces reality itself, intellectually demanding work that’s wholly aggravating because there’s no right answers.

Photo by cfiesler (CC BY)