Part of the hook of the fine podcast Serial, spun off from This American Life and hosted by Sarah Koenig, is that it feels exactly like the grungy, procedurally exacting, multi-episode stories that are so popular right now on television. It feels so much like a great series on Showtime or HBO; it has the flavor of the anticipation and blind alleys and you-gotta-see-this social anticipation of True Detective or Fargo. (Slate has, rather amusingly, created a separate podcast about the Serial podcast that literally creates a new episode to analyze each new episode.) Buzzfeed, in fact, called it "The Year's Best New Crime Drama."
But of course, it's not that. It's not a "crime drama." It's reporting on a real case — that of Adnan Syed, who has been in prison for almost 15 years for the murder of his girlfriend in 1999, when he was 17. And according to the show's description of itself, it's not telling a story that began with an ending in mind: "We'll follow the plot and characters wherever they take us and we won't know what happens at the end of the story until we get there, not long before you get there with us." It's a very good show, and it's been very well received, and it may very well wind up making a lot of people angry.
Now I must wait.