First, for anyone who hasn't listened to the podcast, I'd encourage you to do so. It's twelve episodes averaging about forty minutes apiece, available here. (Slate, which isn't a media franchise with which I typically agree, did a series of reaction/spoilers podcasts that's available here - it's not bad, they give some interesting commentary.) Serial is a spin-off of the popular NPR show This American Life, and it explored a 1999 Baltimore murder case. The podcast, hosted/narrated by TAL producer Sarah Koenig, quickly gained a sort of unprecedented popularity, mostly by word of mouth. A successful listener donation appeal has secured the production of a second season, which is slated for some time in 2015.
Before we go any further, I've collected a bunch of links about Serial over the last few weeks, so let's do a link purge to get them out of my system:
I'm sure that this is only a very small selection of the articles that have been written about the podcast, or items which have been posted in relation to it. A lot has also been made of a subreddit about the case; I'm not actually terribly familiar with Reddit, so I only saw a couple of comment threads there. The take-away, though, is that Serial made a big impact, and its popularity was fed by responses to its content and format on various online outlets.
So, here are some of my thoughts about Serial. Maybe it's just catharsis for me to get these out of my head. Maybe someone will take some interest in one item or another. I apologize if some of it's incoherent, or if it assumes a sort of "stream-of-consciousness" format.
For a variety of reasons, many media productions have suffered an overall decline in quality in recent years. I've lost track of how many movies, or even episodes of TV shows, seem to have no coherent story whatsoever. Most of what Hollywood seems to churn out are sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes - very occasionally, they'll do a mostly-faithful adaptation from a popular literary source, but more often than not these have are adulterated to the point of being little better than the run-of-the-mill garbage. Even shows whose popularity builds from strong story arcs don't always connect the proverbial dots: J.J. Abrams is notorious for this, but not being an adherent to his work, I've also been burned by the finales of Battlestar Galactica, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother. (Chuck was mostly satisfying, but I thought they could have done better. Many media consumers get the impression that, for a variety of reasons, producing quality stories - even fluff stories with no underlying message to them - runs secondary to a formulaic, focus grouped, committee-run production model. Very little is original in the world of American media: consumers tend to get the same stock characters, often with the same names, put into the same situations, with the same incoherent or irrelevant stories, the same computer-generated special effects, and the same tedium. (As many box office flops as Hollywood has produced, you'd think they'd at least try the quality-over-quantity model, but there seems to be no sign of that.)
So, what does this have to do with Serial? Serial was so different. It had a sort of "story arc", with the added dramatic tension of being about a real situation, a real inmate serving a real life sentence for the alleged murder of a real young woman. Insofar as the narrative was incoherent, that incoherence added to the dramatic tension of the story, rather than detracting from it. Ms. Koenig's sort of openness about the entire process, about her own doubts, was both objective and inobjective, but it imbued each podcast with a sort of authenticity, as if the listener was discovering evidence and interpreting it right along with the narrator. Given that most serialized media content is video - either films or television programs - that was a pretty significant innovation for the podcast. Most podcasts follow formats similar to radio programs: episodic, typically discussing one topic or another.
Part of what made Serial so satisfying was that, while it was episodic, and while its episodes focused on distinct topics, the details seemed to come together into a coherent overall narrative and story arc. This seems so lacking from other serialized content - again, mostly videos - in recent memory. Sites like Ex Astris Scientia prove that there's a significant segment of society that's smart enough to remember and correlate details, and those folks are thirsty for compelling, coherent, internally consistent stories. It's really just basic storytelling, but Serial felt satisfying because it was good storytelling. It's tempting to hope that Serial's success will reinvigorate the art of good storytelling, and breathe some life into similar podcasts (and films, and television... ), both fictional and non-fictional, but I'm not holding my breath.
Another reason why I feel like Serial enjoyed some success was its unfortunate coincidence with current events in the United States: the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, and other related cases. I've discussed this topic with several friends, one of whom - the co-worker whose spouse got Lady Jaye to listen earlier than she otherwise would have - provided this story from NPR as part of her answer: "Serial Isn't About Ferguson. (But It's Kind Of About Ferguson.)" As the author notes in the closing paragraph:
As everyone keeps reminding us, we're in the golden age of podcasts, and Serial is often held up as that medium's gold standard. It's well-produced and it's really well-told. It probably would have been a hit even if the country wasn't in the middle of a contentious national debate about cops and courts — fighting over the reliability of prosecutors and witness testimony and grand juries, and rethinking who qualifies as suspicious and why. As it stands, Serial, by a fluke of its timing, is more pointed and incisive than its creators probably intended.I think that's entirely correct. I'm not going to re-hash or provide my incisive analysis on the Michael Brown/Darren Wilson case, or the case of Eric Garner in New York that reinvigorated the national debate. Plenty of people have done that already, and while I think that both sides are talking past one another, nobody's going to be interested in my opinion anyway.* What I do want to note is that I suspect a lot of folks who would have been particularly upset about the Brown and/or Garner cases to begin with, and who were already listening to Serial (or were already going to listen to Serial), were likely further agitated by its content. Being NPR's core constituency, the sort of folks who listened to Serial weren't the sort of folks who were likely to riot, per se; but they were the sort of folks who were likely to attend demonstrations, and to get vocal on social media. Regardless of one's beliefs about the Brown and Garner cases, they were, at their core, the inspiration for debates about police accountability, with race relations either a subordinate or overarching issue depending upon one's perspective. For those who were listening to Serial, the insinuation (or, I would argue, demonstration) that a first generation Pakistani-American was imprisoned based on inconclusive circumstantial evidence and the inconsistent and contradictory testimony of a single unreliable witness, and that the detectives and prosecutors involved in the conviction built such a flimsy case with impunity, does little to assuage the discontent over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
When I was an undergraduate history student, one of the courses my peers and I most dreaded was the infamous "historiography course". It took me years to actually understand what its purpose was, or even what historiography is. At the time, I was sort of led to believe that historiography was the study of how different groups view history. As I've gotten older and had literally a decade to reflect upon that course and others, I've come to think of historiography less as different groups' perception of history - essentially, their historical worldview or Zeitgeist - and more as the methodology of studying the past. According to the undisputed and infallible source of all knowledge:
Historiography refers to both the study of the methodology of historians and the development of history as a discipline, and also to a body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography topically – such as the "historiography of the British Empire," the "historiography of early Islam", or the "historiography of China" – as well as different approaches and genres, such as political history or social history.As I've come to better appreciate that distinction, I've been reminded of a book that we read portions of in my AP U.S. History course in high school: After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. (The book has a second volume, which I've not touched.) The books consist of a number of case studies from American history that provide new evidence to challenge the orthodox view - for example, more than fifteen years later, I still remember a map that might change one's interpretation of the Salem Witch Trials. (That chapter, and some historiography-related questions, are available here - I'll have to check it out later.)
This definition, and that methodology, have become more important to me in recent years, and particularly in the last fifteen or sixteen months. A few years ago, I found myself working in a couple of professional roles that required me to track and cite derivative sources very carefully. That practice led me to develop some methods - often utilizing technology - of my own for keeping track of sources, and of direct quotes, and such. Those skills, methods, and habits were integral to my success in Aberdeen - for example, my dissertation incorporated 229 individual citations from 148 individual sources, all of which were intricately and meticulously cited. It's become particularly important as I've worked on my First World War research, as I've found myself venturing outside my comfort zone of historical research via literary citation, and into the wilderness of archival and oral history.
In most finished historical works, there's little or no discussion of the method or process whereby the historian's research is conducted; instead, the historian is sort of on the hook to provide a finished narrative, albeit appropriately sourced and cited, for the audience to consume. OGHAP has been such a cherished and unique project for me, and I'm not sure how the finished product will incorporate both a clean historical narrative on the one hand, and a discussion of the sources and research methodology on the other.
So, why do I say all of this? Because on the Serial Podcast, Sarah Koenig essentially lays it all out there for the audience to consider. Well, not entirely; for example, there are theories she and her producers don't discuss because they don't have any evidence, and although they release photos and documents on the podcast's website, Ms. Koenig and her associates aren't releasing everything. However, whereas most comparable offerings are boiled down to a narrative consisting only the facts and interpretations that the producers feel are entirely relevant, Ms. Koenig and her colleagues provide much more for their listeners/followers. They discuss the process of trying to correlate multiple pieces of evidence; they discuss the challenges of investigating one lead or another, or one aspect of the case or another. One of Slate's many articles about Serial discusses that from the perspective of investigative journalism, as does the final episode of the Slate Serial Spoilers Special. Of course, "investigative journalism" is essentially a more immediate incarnation of investigative historical research. One of my favorite examples of this came in the final episode, in which the production staff were able to shed new light on a seemingly ironclad aspect of the case by finding a mobile phone contract from 1999, which was included as evidence in an entirely unrelated class action lawsuit from right around the time of the trial. That was impressive.
So, part of Serial that really appealed to me, as a trained and practicing historian, was the sympathy I felt over the Serial production team's tireless efforts to correlate a lot of different kinds of evidence, much of it conflicting, to try to construct a coherent story. I found this aspect of Serial extremely compelling, and the fact that the Serial production team's investigation didn't produce an airtight narrative of what did happen, but ultimately demonstrated that the prosecution's timeline didn't happen, made a profound statement.
As several of those links I included above note, Serial left plenty of unanswered questions. Even so, I think that the lack of a hard and fast answer became the message of the first season. In fact, that lack of a hard and fast answer, juxtaposed against a justice system whose fundamental tenets include the requirement of a hard and fast answer to meet a burden of proof for conviction, would seem to serve as the first season's definitive conclusion. In the process, it explored and elucidated a variety of other issues and concepts, and that's more than I can say for so much of what the media industry churns out anymore.
Since I wrote the bulk of this post, some outfit called "The Intercept" scored an interview with the star/sole witness in the Lee/Syed case, known on the Serial Podcast only by his first name, Jay. You can read parts 1, 2, and 3. My reaction to the interview is that he still can't get his story straight, he's still paranoid (and possibly mentally ill if you ask me), and he's still just looking out for number one, with no regard to the collateral damage that comes from protecting him and his. For example, in the third installment, Jay says:
"I sent her an email back asking if she’d been leaking court documents or my personal information to Reddit. My wife had told me [that she thought] either Sarah or one of the producers was talking to a moderator on Reddit, and I felt that either Sarah or Rabia Chaudry[...] were giving confidential information to Reddit. I asked her if that’s true. Then she replied. She said, ‘No,’ but I didn’t believe her. I did not think she was being honest with me."To which I respond: "Gee, that must be really awful to have someone lying to/about you." Say what you will about the guilt or innocence of Adnan Syed, but Jay should have done time for Accessory After the Fact (with which he was charged and given probation) and perjury, minimum. The fact that Jay is married, raising a family, and free as a bird while Syed has spent the last fifteen years of his life serving a life sentence is a bald faced miscarriage of justice.
* In the unlikely event that anyone actually is interested in my opinion, here it is. On the topic of Michael Brown and Officer Darren Wilson, I think it's obvious that Brown attacked Wilson and that Wilson's actions were justified. Acknowledging that police do a difficult job for which there is little or no room for error, I still wonder whether Brown might have been subdued and detained with sub-lethal force, vice deadly force, had Officer Wilson's head been on a tighter swivel; but the bottom line is that the evidence demonstrated that Wilson shot brown in legitimate self defense. I was disappointed by Officer Wilson's interview with George Stephanopoulos (both that he did it, and his complete lack of regret), and with the Ferguson PD's crowd control and public relations efforts (they seemed to do better after the grand jury opinion than they had during the initial controversy).
I'm more uncomfortable with the Eric Garner case, for several reasons. First, I question whether selling loose cigarettes, or suspicion thereof, should constitute an arrestable offense. The police already seemed committed to arresting Garner, to the point of surrounding him. Eric Garner absolutely shouldn't have resisted arrest; but once the police had used (what seems to me like excessive) force to arrest him, his welfrare was their responsibility. As an overweight asthmatic laid detained, handcuffed, and unable to breathe, not a single police officer or paramedics in attendance intervened on his behalf. I asked a close friend who's in law enforcement about this, and he told me that "positional asphyxia is constantly harped on in our training", and while defending the use of force, noted that "that doesn't absolve officers from taking the appropriate steps to render aid when the scene is safe". Even without the controversy over the unauthorized choke hold (in defending the police, my favorite talk show host, Michael Medved (who has no experience in law enforcement) calls it a "submission hold", which strikes me as a difference without a distinction), it seems obvious to me that the emergency personnel involved should have all been dismissed, and most or all should have been indicted on the charge of criminally negligent homicide; at the very least, none of them should be working as police officers or emergency medical personnel.
I don't think we have an epidemic of racism in America, though I understand why some people very sincerely believe that we do. I believe that there is room for improvement in American law enforcement culture and practices, but the fact that Michael Brown and Eric Garner were both resisting arrest (albeit under vastly different circumstances) makes a national conversation about law enforcement reform more difficult to have, not less so.
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