Sarah Koenig is a vault when it comes to season two of her podcast “Serial,” which airs this fall.
“It’s a very different kind of story,” she says before pausing for a hope-inducing glimmer of a moment. And then: “I’m sorry, that’s as far as I go.”
She’s a tough nut to crack. And yet millions of people feel they know her. She has kept them company for hours during commutes and housework, her familiar cadence flowing into earbuds and living rooms.
The Peabody Award-winning podcast launched last October. Koenig and executive producer Julie Snyder, plus producers Dana Chivvis and Emily Condon, had been working on another popular audio show, “This American Life,” before spinning off a new project. (“This American Life’s” Ira Glass is also an editorial adviser.) Rather than run through a single story each episode, the women would dive deep into one subject for an entire season. It was an immediate hit, thanks in part to its provocative story. The first season focused on a 15-year-old murder case in which a high school senior, Adnan Syed, was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. But there were holes in the story, and Koenig, along with the “Serial” team, spent the season carefully examining each one.
Suddenly the water cooler talk and its digital equivalents revolved around Syed’s guilt or innocence. Sides were taken, speculation abounded. And just like that, “Serial” cracked the code of podcast success, spurring the kind of conversation that surrounds “Game of Thrones” or “The Walking Dead.”
Just one problem: This was a real case, and people wanted to influence the outcome of the story. A forum on Reddit materialized devoted to rehashing the case, poking holes in Koenig’s hole-poking and broadcasting sensitive information about interviewees, including people who were anonymous on the show.
For the most part, Koenig managed to block out the noise.
“I didn’t look at (Reddit) because it freaked me out, and also I didn’t have the time,” she said. But the team would monitor the forum, on the lookout for anything defamatory or for fresh intel.
As it turned out, the armchair detectives yielded nothing. After all, they weren’t doing the kind of investigative reporting Koenig and her team were. She had spent about a year gathering information and interviewing people before the first episode aired. That made it especially frustrating when the “Serial” subreddit regulars called her out for supposedly missing some crucial piece of the puzzle.
“Sometimes it would get reported that something on Reddit was new and Sarah Koenig didn’t report it,” Koenig said. “And I would get so tempted to be like, I already knew that you guys, I just chose not to report it for actual ethical reasons that you guys don’t care about.”
The online commentary and occasional backlash clearly left an impact, even if the work itself was rewarding. Snyder compared creating each episode to putting on a middle school play. It was a high-energy, shoestring operation.
“And the fact that people were responding to it in such an enormous way was so fun,” she said. “It was just the online stuff that was absolutely not fun … that was the part of it that, for me at least, was sort of horrible.”
The “online stuff” has affected the way the women are approaching season two. For one thing, they can no longer guarantee a source anonymity. It has affected story selection, too. Even as the pair refuses to give details about the subject of season two, there’s some sense that another murder mystery – and all the amateur sleuths it would entice – may be too much of a burden to bear again, at least for now.
But at its core, the next season will be just like round one: A well-told story unfolding over multiple weeks. It’s an age-old concept with a magical ability to make people stop staring at their smartphones for a few minutes.
“I think sometimes we get told so much that we’re sort of half-wits that only have the attention span of 30 seconds and 140 characters, and we start to believe it,” Snyder said. “That’s just not true … For millennia, people have always really liked stories and we’ll always continue to like stories, and (‘Serial’) proved it — again.”
Some liked the story so much, they tracked down the creators so they could talk shop. What surprised Koenig and Snyder was what people wanted to discuss.
“I thought that they would want to know what I thought, because I know everything, I’ve read everything, I’ve heard everything, I’ve seen everything,” Snyder said. “But then I realized that nobody wants that. They just want to tell me what they think.”
Just like with Reddit, people with theories thought they could help crack the case. And what were the wackiest of the speculative scenarios?
“It’s not even right to talk about them, because it’s damaging to real people,” Koenig said. “I mean this is our problem, right? It sounds so wet blankety to say but this is what gave us heart attacks all the time: These are real people.”
“I’ve come to discover that nobody should ever tell me anything,” Snyder admitted. “I’m a horrible secret keeper.”
“That’s why I haven’t told you what we’re working on,” Koenig replied.
“And you shouldn’t, because people come up and ask me and then I say, ‘oh but I can’t tell you,’ and then all it takes is a little, ‘come on please? A little something?’ And I have the strongest desire to want to tell them.”
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