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Serial – podcasts

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I somehow missed that this has been happening. Produced by Ira Glass and This American Life. (In fact, this journalist Sarah Koenig sounds like she is doing an imitation of Ira’s style, both writing and delivery. It was quite distracting to me at first. But she is definitely using that conversational delivery, direct address rather than just a detached narration report.)

This story is kind of like the listener is playing detective in this murder case that happened 15 years ago, and Sarah Koenig is the listener’s avatar or stand-in. She seems to be asking the kinds of questions that not only she wants answered but also what she thinks we, the listeners, want answered, too. So she is a classic narrator, the kind who appear in both fiction and nonfiction. She was approached by someone who was a friend of the young man who was convicted of this murder (a jury found him guilty of strangling his former girlfriend) who didn’t believe he was guilty and thought he had been railroaded. So Koenig takes on the task of talking to the convicted killer, now in prison, a lot of witnesses, looking at the physical evidence, of which there was very little, and essentially playing detective.

There is a lot to listen to, 11 episodes so far. It is very skillful storytelling. Just listen to the beginning of Episode 1. First we hear the automated phone message announcing a call from a prisoner, then Koenig goes into a little essay, almost, about how hard it is to remember things, which she does by asking several teenagers who she knows to tell her what they were doing 6 weeks ago and of course they don’t remember. And then at 3:50, a couple of minutes in, she begins to tell us what it’s all about. So she uses foreshadowing with the phone message, so we know this is going to be about something to do with a crime, and then adeptly introduces the kinds of characters she will be dealing with, i.e. teens, and demonstrates that they don’t remember anything very well. The main characters themselves are no longer teens. The case happened 15 years ago. So she uses teens who are teens now to remind us what these people were like. And she introduces suspense, by letting us know that the story is going to turn on memory. Then she starts the story.

The story follows a classic whodunnit form in some ways. “What was the nature of the killer?” is the key question. And it’s a classic question for crime stories, again both fictional and nonfiction. She seems to let us in on everything she is finding out, we listen to interviews and go where she goes. But she also holds things back until she can get the maximum storytelling impact from them – sometimes small things, sometimes a revealing piece of information about one of the characters.

Episode 7 is a bit different. Most of the first half, about 15 minutes, is Koenig having a conversation with an attorney who heads the Innocence Project at the University of Virginia. The conversation does not seem to be edited. It feels as though we are right there in the room with the two – although, weirdly, I think they are not in the same room. Koenig says she asked the attorney to go to a studio and talk with her. Did Koenig go to the same studio? Were they talking by phone or Skype? It’s not clear. So, even though it feels like verite, if you think about it from outside the story, it’s clear there is a lot of construction going on.

It’s gripping, there is a lot to say about the series. And the last episode comes this Thursday.

42 Comments

on “Serial – podcasts”
42 Comments on “Serial – podcasts”

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