The hit podcast “Serial“, which just finished its first 12-episode season, has been one of the great pop culture surprises of 2014. Hosted by Sarah Koenig, the NPR spin-off of “This American Life” follows the 1999 murder of high school student Hae Min Lee, and the conviction of her alleged killer, Adnan Syed. In November “Serial” broke 5 million downloads on iTunes, hitting that mark faster than any previous podcast. That number will only continue to grow as word spreads, and rightfully so. The story is engrossing, even mesmerizing.
Koenig follows three main figures: Adnan, the accused killer, Hae, Adnan’s ex-girlfriend and victim, and Jay, a friend of Adnan’s and the only witness to the crime. Adnan, who spoke with Koenig for almost a year from a Maryland maximum security prison, is charming and intelligent, and denies any involvement in the crime. His supporters, mostly friends and family, continue to profess his innocence and point out the flaws in the case. The series weaves together elements of the case from start to finish, exploring threads that the police ignored and defenses that the attorneys didn’t consider to establish whether or not Adnan is really guilty.
In Koenig’s investigation, she acts as part radio host, part Sherlock Holmes, and full-on gonzo journalist. Given these shifting roles and the mercurial subject matter, the series defies easy genre categorization. There are aspects of a police procedural, courtroom drama, and a dose of late 1990s nostalgia. As Koenig reads witness affidavits and interviews old friends, we also hear petty gossip about teen sex lives, drug use, and the interactions of social cliques that make some parts of the podcast sound more like a high school melodrama than a gruesome examination of a murder.
Despite the familiar trappings of popular entertainment, however, these are real human beings; this is not fiction. The realities of the case and the open access to the participants’ most intimate, private moments are part of what makes “Serial” so engaging, and also so troubling. The podcast sometimes feels intensely voyeuristic, an unusual trait for a medium that has no images at all. Hae’s family did not consent to the production of the show, and when Koenig reads her private diary entries, you’re fascinated, but disgusted at the thought that you’re only hearing them because their young author was brutally murdered.
In that respect “Serial” closely resembles one of cinema’s greatest portrayals of voyeurism, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Like James Stewart’s character, L.B. Jefferies, who obsessively watches a suspicious neighbor through a telescope, Koenig sees something fishy in this case, but she can’t quite be sure what. Like Jefferies, she’s a journalist, not a detective, and has to grapple with unreliable witnesses and vague memories, massive flaws in the narrative. In “Serial” as in Rear Window, too, the rule of physics holds: You can’t observe something without changing it. In the film’s climactic scene, Stewart’s character is physically pulled through his window and forced to interact with the world and the murderer whom he has been surveilling. By the end of “Serial”, Koenig has come a long way from simply reading police reports. Her podcast has resulted in new witnesses coming forward and new evidence being tested, which could ultimately alter the outcome of the case. But that’s not due to Koenig alone—the audience is complicit in this voyeurism as well. Some of the witnesses came forward not because Koenig had asked, but because the listeners made the podcast so popular that they felt compelled to respond.
The show’s irresistible voyeurism doesn’t entirely explain its popularity, however. “Serial” isn’t merely a peep show. It touches on fundamental issues, not only deeply personal questions of memory and relationships but also contemporary American political tensions. Over the past couple years the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others have millions of Americans questioning the fairness of the criminal justice system: how police interact with witnesses, particularly unreliable ones; how they treat minority suspects and victims; how prosecutors and juries operate; and challenges to the basic presumption of innocence.
“Serial” essentially asks us to imagine ourselves as jurors: do we, as a jury of his peers, think Adnan Syed is guilty? But we also have to think about issues of legal principle. The judge in the case instructed the jury to disregard Syed’s decision to exercise his 5th Amendment right to not speak at trial. And yet every juror Koenig interviewed said that decision had a definite impact in their rendering a guilty verdict. Americans are interested in these questions, now more than ever. While Koenig points out that the number of ambiguities in this case, the lack of direct evidence, and apparent space for reasonable doubt are all unusual in a first degree murder charge, they should be concerning for any citizen, whether you think Adnan Syed murdered Hae Min Lee or not.
“Serial” is in some ways a classic whodunit, but without the traditional denouement in which the detective unmasks the murderer. Without a smoking gun, without some CSI-style analysis of DNA, ballistics, and blood-spatter, the listener must make subjective judgments. America is a nation of laws and not men. But if “Serial” succeeds at anything, it’s in showing that our justice system is ultimately all too human.
