“Serial” Will Be Credited With Helping Adnan Syed Go Free For Better And For Worse

Almost none of these criticisms or parallel investigations and media made it into this newest episode of Serial, though. Chaudry is mentioned, but almost perfunctorily, long after Koenig has gone through a brisk, almost by-the-numbers roundup of what’s transpired in the past eight years. There is little sense (or criticism) of the fandom aspects that govern interest in true crime these days. That Pandora’s box opened years ago, but Koenig doesn’t — or pretends not to — acknowledge this.

The quaint sense I felt listening to the episode had as much to do with content as it did with style. What felt fresh from a sound engineering and production standpoint in fall 2014 sounds awfully dated now. Granted, this fate befalls many an innovator who inspires numerous copycats and parodies, as Serial did. One need only watch the hilarious 2017 Netflix parody American Vandal or chortle at Tina Fey’s depiction of the stop-at-nothing podcast host Cinda Canning on the Hulu television series Only Murders in the Building for further understanding.

The episode does at least address why Syed’s vacated conviction is so infuriating: that the evidence underpinning the motion by prosecutors “was known or knowable to cops and prosecutors back in 1999.” Koenig concludes at the episode’s end, “It’s hard to feel cheered about a triumph of fairness, because we’ve built a system that takes more than 20 years to self-correct.” She would later add in a New York Times interview, “There is nothing unusual about the presence of these systemic problems in Adnan’s case. Nothing.”

Just as the original season of Serial came to an ambiguous ending, so too does this new episode. Just as Serial marked the beginning of the true crime moment we’ve been in ever since, so too does this new episode mark an inflection point, though I would be loath to call it an endpoint. Because the same problems still apply as they did in 2020, when it appeared that the massive protests after the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor might bring about real change. Serial killers are still glamorized. The media still, too often, parrot the police party line. And catharsis still comes at the expense of Black and brown bodies.

True crime will have another moment. There will be more developments in the Adnan Syed case. What must also not be lost is that the family of Hae-Min Lee has been living with open emotional wounds that have been perpetually exacerbated by the intense media interest, the vertigo-inducing legal developments, and the participatory element of internet sleuths for more than two decades. As her brother, Young Lee, said at Monday’s hearing, “Every day, when I think it’s over, whenever I think it’s over, or it’s ended, it’s always come back. … This is not a podcast for me, this is real life.” ●