‘Serial’ Podcast Finale: A Desire for ‘Eureka’ as the Digging Ends
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 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
the 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.
On
Thursday morning, our long national nightmare of suspense ended. The
12th and final episode of the first season 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, Md. 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
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 through 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. She 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 that Mr. Syed is probably
innocent, or at a 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 called her 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 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 partly buried body, a potential suspect
who is referred to as “Mr. S.,” turned out to have a penchant for
streaking. A phrase that popped out of the mouth of the “Serial”
producer Dana Chivvis 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 “12 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
took 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.
She
has come on 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 three
million listeners per episode. After an online fund-raising effort, a
second season is in the works. A writer for The Guardian has called the
fever around the show “the Beatlemania of the nebbishy public radio
long-form nonfiction world.” Ms. Koenig, in this world, is for now Paul
and John at the same time.
The
backlash against “Serial” is sure to commence momentarily (in a few
places, it began weeks ago), which may end up being a tonic for the show
and for everyone else. We’ll see knockoffs of all stripes in the near
future.
“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 never did.
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