All of these cases involved considerable reasonable doubt about the suspects guilt.Close Alert Close Sign In Search Search News Books Culture Fiction Poetry Humor Cartoons Magazine Crossword Video Podcasts Archive Goings On Shop Open Navigation Menu Menu Story Saved To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.Close Alert Close Cultural Comment What Serial Really Taught Us By Sarah Larso n December 18, 2014 Facebook Twitter Email Print Save Story Save this story for later.The introduction to Serial told us that the shows producers had flipped back and forth in their thinking about Adnan Syeds guilt, and so would we.
Courtesy Serial Facebook Twitter Email Print Save Story Save this story for later. The final episode of the first season of Serialthe podcast to end all podcastscame out this morning. Like other devotees, Ive listened to many episodes more than once, felt sympathy for Adnan Syed and the loved ones of Hae Min Lee, confusion about Jay, and even more confusion about the cell-phone evidence. Ive felt a listeners kinship with the host, Sarah Koenig, and made jokes about MailChimp and the shrimp sale at the Crab Crib. Serial lured us in with the promise of a good storya murder mystery given the This American Life treatment, but over an entire season, like an HBO drama. Long anticipated and much discussed, it was a major cultural eventeven though by now we expected something closer to the mood of the Sopranos finale than to Sherlock Holmes. The show presented us with the very best of what radio and podcasts can do. It provided listeners with the voices of the many people involved with the case, detailing accounts, ideas, memories. It made good-faith efforts to solve the dozens of small mysteries that were part of the big mysterywhere people were on January 13, 1999, and what they were doing; whether there was a pay phone at a certain Best Buy; the implications of events at high-school dances. We felt like we were listening to a story, an entertainment, but in truth what we were listening to was much bigger than that. In the beginning, Koenig, a This American Life producer, had wanted to do a spinoff podcast involving a story told over time. When the show began broadcasting, Koenig and the other producers were still gathering information. They knew they had enough for a great show, but they didnt know how it would end. From the start, intentionally or not, the show was about doubt. Ira Glass, in his introduction to Serial on This American Life, told us that what really happened was actually much more complicated than what the jury heard, and that each week, we will go with Sarah on her hunt to figure out what really happened. This implied that there was a thriller in the works, but he also said that the producers of SerialKoenig, Dana Chivvis, and Julie Snyderhave flipped back and forth in their thinking about Adnans guilt, and so would we. We cited examples: Snyder told me about the documentary The Staircase, which the producers of Serial had watched; I mentioned the 1994 William Finnegan piece Doubt. I also thought, both at the time and as I listened to Serial in the following weeks, about a jury Id served as an alternate for, in a case involving a violent incident in which details and motiveslike those in Syeds casewere unclear.
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