Courtesy: Serial
Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder & the Rest of the Serial Team
Koenig, a veteran journalist and a producer on Ira Glass‘ seminal This American Life radio show, had no idea that her weekly deep dive into Syed’s case—with executive producer Snyder—would turn into a cultural phenomenon. She also insists she came into it with no preconceptions and was not trying to exonerate Adnan.
“I wasn’t—and we weren’t—trying to create problems where there were none,” Koenig told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 2014 after season one’s 12-episode run ended. “…Obviously I don’t want anyone to suffer because of the work I’m doing, but I also feel like there’s a strong tradition of doing these kinds of investigative stories. And we weren’t doing anything differently than we would do in any other story.”
Talking to Adnan (the sound of his collect call from prison became one of the podcast’s identifying features) was “very complicated,” she said. “A lot is going on in any one conversation with Adnan, which is…he might be innocent and he might be guilty. It’s zero sum, a little bit, right?”
With Syed’s case very much still in the news several years later, and the national news at that, Koenig again reflected on the public’s reaction to Serial.
“I felt very confused. I was so confused,” she told NPR in April 2017. “You know, we literally— we made it from my basement in my house because that was the quietest place. And, you know, as we got going I was really just living in the basement. And so it felt like I was, like, this troll person. And then, like, I came into the light and there were all these people looking at me. And I was like, what is happening? Like, I was just in the basement.”
She and Snyder made another interesting but ultimately less engrossing second season of Serial, about Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by the Taliban for five years but after being released was accused of being a traitorous deserter.
The phenom quotient is high again, however, with S-Town, the latest podcast from Serial Productions’ Koenig and Julie Snyder which, unlike Serial, was released all at once in a seven-episode bingeable chunk. Hosted by Brian Reed, the show delves into the life of Woodstock, Ala., resident John B. McLemore and…to say any more would be giving it away.