Listening to the first season of “
Serial,” Sarah Koenig’s breakout true-crime drama, a spinoff of “This American Life” that’s become the most popular podcast in the history of the form, has been like observing a lo-fi but formidable space launch.
All the parts have ticked and glistened. In Ms. Koenig, an unlikely star has been born. The story she’s intimately told over the course of 12 episodes has made plenty of us drive a bit wobblier (a lot of podcast listeners tap into their car stereos via Bluetooth) and feel the occasional tingle of campfire-narration awe.
Yet stories, especially nonfiction murder inquiries like this one, require endings. A question has burned from the start: Would Ms. Koenig be able to guide “Serial” home — that is, would it arrive at resolution about the guilt or innocence of the imprisoned young Muslim man, Adnan Syed, at its center — or would it pull a slow fade into indeterminacy, like the Philae comet lander, which ditched in the shade and slowly lost battery power?
Mike Pesca, on a recent Slate podcast, practically begged Ms. Koenig for closure. “Don’t let this,” he said, “wind up being a contemplation on the nature of truth.” (Slate, which has its own litter of podcasts,
has covered “Serial” as assiduously as British tabloids cover a royal birth.) Ms. Koenig has been candid about the fact that definitive answers — she’s performed her investigation in something like real time, tightrope walking without the benefit of a net — may be impossible to come by.
Thursday morning, our long national nightmare of suspense ended. The 12th and final episode of “Serial” beamed online at 6 a.m. I won’t be fully able to duck spoilers here, so proceed with caution. As absorbing as this final episode was, somewhere out there, Mr. Pesca surely has his head in his hands.
The last episode was a tangled and heartfelt yet frustrating hour of radio, in which Ms. Keonig hemmed and hawed and pored back over old evidence and asked, “Did we just spend a year applying excessive scrutiny to a perfectly ordinary case?” The answer to that question, apparently, is no and yes, and yes and no. Unlike the conclusions of Agatha Christie novels, real life can make only murky puddles.
For those who haven’t kept up, the “Serial” podcast is about a murder that happened almost 16 years ago in Baltimore County, Maryland. Hae Min Lee, a smart, attractive and athletic senior at Woodlawn High School, disappeared after school on Jan. 13, 1999. Her body turned up almost a month later in a city park. She had been strangled.
Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Mr. Syed, was popular, outgoing, a Woodlawn High homecoming prince. He was arrested in the crime and eventually ultimately sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. The case against him was hardly airtight, but the key witness, a friend of Mr. Syed’s named Jay, said he had helped him bury Ms. Lee’s body in the woods. Mr. Syed has always maintained his innocence.
Those are the basic facts, yet the story Ms. Koenig has told has been far more winding, complicated and offbeat. She’s pored over court testimony, cellphone records and police interrogation tapes. She has interviewed friends, family members, lawyers and forensic specialists. She has poked an array of holes in the state’s case, even finding a potential alibi that was overlooked in court. Ms. Koenig took a deep dive into the Islamophobia that may have been at work in the case. Would the American-born Mr. Syed, who is of Pakistani descent, have been convicted had he not been a Muslim?
You could tell Ms. Koenig has often thought Mr. Syed is probably innocent, or at minimum, received from his lawyers a halfhearted defense. She came to like him, and so did we. But as she put it in one episode, “What if he is this amazing psychopath and I’m getting played?”
The soul of “Serial” has been in the way Ms. Koenig has done her digging so transparently, airing niggling doubts along the way. She’s incorporated new evidence, sometimes from people who have rung her up only after having their memories jogged by the most recent podcast. As she has moved along, she has uprooted the way murder mysteries are usually told. She’s allowed us to feel like Harper Lee, riding shotgun with Truman Capote as he reported “In Cold Blood,” before he too conveniently mangled facts in his telling.
“Serial” plowed up entire fields of odd detail for listeners to linger over. The man who discovered Ms. Lee’s partially buried body, a potential suspect who is called “Mr. S.,” turned out to have a penchant for streaking. A phrase that popped out of “Serial” producer Dana Chivvis’s mouth during a re-enactment of a crucial event — “There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib” —became a tasty Internet meme. I made the mistake of Googling the phrase, and now T-shirts bearing the slogan follow me across the Internet.
At the conclusion of the final episode of “Serial,” Ms. Koenig, channeling Henry Fonda in “Twelve Angry Men,” remarks that, “As a juror, I have to acquit Adnan Syed.” Yet she’s a journalist, not a juror. She adds: “So just as a human being, walking down the street next week, what do I think? If you ask me to swear that Adnan Syed is innocent, I couldn’t do it. I nurse doubt.” Many will listen and conclude: “They got the right guy.”
“Serial” has demonstrated the bedrock truth of Calvin Trillin’s assertion, in his book “Killings” (1984), that “when someone dies suddenly shades are drawn up.” A murder “gives us an excuse to be there, poking around in someone’s life.” The human details tend to be why we’re there. They’re what resonate, even if the whodunit elements never catch fire. Endings aren’t as important to me, in terms of fiction at any rate, as they are to many people. (I’ve had mighty arguments on this topic with friends.) If a writer has kept me hooked on a long, westward cross-country drive and blows a tire at the Nevada-California border, I rarely hold a grudge. I bail out on most writers back in Scranton.
This is a way of saying that no matter how “Serial” stuck its landing, I had decided by Episode 3 that I would follow Ms. Koenig’s work wherever it takes her. She is an agile writer of cool, declarative sentences. Her voice — literate, probing, witty, seemingly without guile — is an intoxicating one to have in your head.
Ms. Koenig has come on in “Serial” like equal parts Janet Malcolm, Nancy Drew, Patricia Cornwell and the Errol Morris of documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line.”
I liked to imagine her, as if she were Claire Danes in “Homeland,” haphazardly taping bits of evidence along an apartment wall while pounding Syrah and cranking John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Even the stop-and-start verbalizations and vocal fry — overused crutches on public radio — sound good on her. The sound “Serial” has made is a personal one, that of a smart woman puzzling it all out.
If a part of the impact of “Serial” has been watching Ms. Koenig’s rise, another part has been watching the revivifying of an old form, the radio serial. She’s made a show that seems dowdy and postmodern all at once. Each episode found its own length, from 28 to 56 minutes. There’s a primal pull to radio drama that many of us had nearly forgotten. We were eager on some level (perhaps too eager) to submit to the spell that “Serial” cast.
Ms. Koenig is a producer on “This American Life,” Ira Glass’s popular public radio show. It’s a broadcast I’ve long been of two minds about. The best of its segments bang the nail cleanly home. A great many others blow a uniquely grating sort of wind, and deliver more style (usually imitations of Mr. Glass’s own) than substance.
In “Serial” Ms. Koenig has managed to put her understated style fully in service of her substance. Which is not to say that the show didn’t have its lacunae. Among other things, it never really brought Ms. Lee, the crime’s victim, to life. (Despite multiple efforts, Ms. Koenig told us, the victim’s family never spoke with her.)
Her hunch about this story, despite an inconclusive, “Sopranos"-like ending, has paid off. “Serial” has replaced “This American Life” as the most downloaded podcast on iTunes, with an average of nearly 3 million listeners per episode. After an online fund-raising effort, a second season is in the works. A writer in The Guardian has called the fever around the show “the Beatlemania of the nebbishy public radio longform nonfiction world.” Ms. Koenig, in this world, is for now Paul and John at the same time.
“Serial” isn’t truly over. There’s still untested DNA evidence. Mr. Syed hopes for appeals. Like the sleeping Philae comet lander, the case may yet catch some sunlight and blip back to life.
For now — though we are left bereft and a bit baffled by the ending of “Serial” — it’s pleasant to recall the way Ms. Koenig announced in Episode 4, before wading through a bit of long and technical courtroom testimony, “I’m going to try very hard not to bore you right now.” With few exceptions, she n
