WASHINGTON: For 15 years, nobody outside Maryland cared much about the murder of a South Korean-born high school teen, supposedly at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, the son of Pakistani immigrants.
Now, it seems, everyone does. The perplexing tale of Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed is at the heart of Serial, an hour-long weekly podcast that’s become an unlikely global Internet phenomenon.
Fans speak of being “addicted” and “obsessed” with the programme. Those who caught the bug early can’t wait for Thursdays, when fresh instalments drop. Latecomers binge on past episodes.
It’s been downloaded more than five million times from Apple’s iTunes store, where it’s a Top 10 hit in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, India, South Africa and Germany.
It can also be heard on the show’s www.serialpodcast.org website. Between episodes, online chatter rages on social media. Reddit hosts an exhaustive Serial discussion board. Bloggers speculate who’s telling the truth — and who might not be.
Serial is a spin-off from This American Life, a long-running and hip US public radio series that’s famous for quirky topics and laid-back story-telling style. Its runaway success — as a podcast, no less — has taken its creators by surprise.
“We kind of expected to be in the sleepier realms of the podcast world,” senior producer Julie Snyder said. We were hoping for good numbers. But we were not at all expecting so many people listening and writing about the show and having a lot of interest about the show,” she said. “And it’s international. We didn’t plan for that at all.”
Serial comes across as part investigative journalism, part police procedural, part soap opera, with a nod to the 19th century serialised novels of Charles Dickens and Emile Zola.
Unclear is whether Serial might turn up fresh material that would compel judicial authorities to reopen the case — and Snyder said that’s not the point of the show, either. “We’ve said from the beginning that we don’t know where it’s going to end,” she added, ahead of today’s release of episode nine. Serial is likely to run for about 12 episodes overall, but the producer cautioned: “We don’t know for sure, because we are still doing the reporting.” AFP
