Last week, Serial Productions launched its latest podcast series (and the sixth since being subsumed by the New York Times Company) “The Retrievals.” In true Serial-ized fashion, the five episodes will be released once a week.
The first episode is strong—it focuses on a group of women at the Yale Fertility Center who underwent egg retrieval procedures unanesthetized because one of the nurses there was stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline. Hoo-boy. The show promises to engage with narratives of pain and addiction, as well as the way the medical establishment has mistrust of women baked into its institutional procedures. For what it’s worth, I think this kind of story has the potential to marry true crime with “medical mysteries” in a way more in keeping with the genre’s possibilities than the argument put forward by Eleanor Cummins in her article “Are Medical Mysteries the New True Crime,” but I’ve already spouted off at the mouth about that one.
I’d like to write a review of the “Retrievals” series when it concludes, but in the meantime, its premiere sent me back to the entire Serial catalogue. Can you believe there have been nine previous podcast series under the Serial umbrella? Can you believe I have opinions on all of them? What follows are my unscientific rankings of each podcast series Serial has produced from least favorite to most beloved, based largely on my memory of their content, how obsessed I got with them, and vibes.
#9: The Improvement Association
No shade to Zoe Chace or the unquestionably urgent topic: a five-episode series about election fraud in North Carolina. The truth is, I can barely remember anything I liked or disliked about it, which can’t be a good thing.
#8: The Coldest Case in Laramie
Debuting the first of its eight episodes just this past February, perhaps this investigative series from Times reporter Kim Barker suffers for me from high expectations. I have a lot of family history with Laramie, Wyoming, where both my parents and aunt went to college, and have visited there several times myself. The story—a forty-year-old unsolved murder of a young woman, an arrest of a police officer that went nowhere, a reporter with uneasy ties to a complicated town—should have been true crime catnip. But for me, Barker’s early and often stated antipathy for Laramie is both under- and overdeveloped in the way she approaches her investigation of Shelli Wiley’s death. The concluding episode states the argument of the show (memories are unreliable) rather than building it slowly over the course of the series. That’s a “meh” from me.
#7: Serial Season 2
The follow-up to the blockbuster award-winning first season of O.G. Serial was always going to be a tough sell. There was a lot that was interesting in Sarah Koenig’s approach to reconstructing soldier Bowe Bergdahl’s decision to walk off his Army outpost in Afghanistan in 2009, his five years of imprisonment by the Taliban, and the fallout from his negotiated release and return home. She interviews e.v.e.r.y.b.o.d.y who would talk to her, and allows Bergdahl to speak for himself without excessively shaping or editorializing a narrative that is confused and confusing. For me, the episodes themselves could have used a bit more shaping and editorializing, though. I came away without a sense of the episode’s point of view on any of the institutions Bergdahl’s story touched upon. A good swing but a miss.
#6: Nice White Parents
From this point on, all the entries are various shades of awesome. This five-episode series hosted by one of my favorite This American Life producers, Chana Joffe-Walt, looks at two decades of school reforms and finds how consistently and thoroughly desegregation efforts have failed students of color. Joffe-Walt has a connection to the story—she lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood where a group of “nice white parents” sent their children to a school with predominantly Black and brown students in a misguided and naive attempt to “improve it.” The series is not technically, or really in any sense, “true crime,” but the episodes perform an important and uncomfortable critique of how educational systems privilege white perspectives and needs in ways that actively perpetuate inequality. And Joffe-Walt is an incredibly funny and insightful narrator!
#5: The Trojan Horse Affair
Brian Reed, another This American Life lifer, makes his first appearance on this list with the 2022 podcast he co-hosted with Pakistani British former doctor and journalism student Hamza Syed. The show billed itself as “a mystery in eight parts,” and it boldly didn’t follow the Serial formula of releasing one episode per week, leaning into the potential for listener bingeability. The series follows Brian and Hamza as they try to nail down the provenance of a letter that claimed to reveal an Islamist plot to infiltrate British secondary schools. The mystery takes some unexpected and compelling twists and turns, but what is most revealing is Brian’s realizations, sometimes through self-reflection, sometimes through Hamza’s emotional labor, of his own Islamophobia and perhaps outdated and inappropriate assumptions of what journalism is “for” when telling such a story. Ends with a bit of a whimper, but still a really strong effort.
#4: We Were Three
This one flew under the radar a bit when it was released last year—perhaps because it, unlike the other longer-form series on this list, is only a tight three episodes. But those episodes carry a huge emotional wallop. This American Life producer Nancy Updike narrates the show, but the storytelling largely belongs to Rachel McKibbons, a a poet who lost her father and brother to Covid within weeks of each other in 2021. As Rachel tells her story, the lens widens from a story about the damage wrought by online misinformation during the pandemic to look at how grief can clarify and intensify relationships with “difficult” family members, whether they’re still with us or not. A tough listen but beautifully told.
#3: S-Town
Brian Reed (again) with the first non-Serial titled production From Serial Productions. Everything about this story, of a relationship Reed built with a man named John B. from a small town in Alabama, surprised and compelled me. John contacts Brian to sell the story of an unsolved murder mystery in his Southern shittown, but the podcast turns into much more than that. I still remember the exact street I was crossing during *that moment* of episode 2. The way the story was produced brought up legitimate questions of privacy and criticisms of its treatment of queerness. But something about it felt like it was really testing the boundaries of what the form could do; that is, I don’t think this story would be as successful as anything other than a podcast.
#2: Serial Season 1
#1: Serial Season 3
This sort of feels like the Godfather vs. Godfather II debate, but I think that despite the groundbreaking and culture shaping work of the first season of Serial, the third season is the superior example of storytelling and form.
But let’s take a moment to appreciate the first season’s innovations. Though investigating an unsolved murder (in this case from fifteen years prior) is not new in true crime, host Sarah Koenig’s foregrounding of her own experience of the investigation felt fresh and radical. As she traced the official and unofficial accounts of the death of Hae Min Lee and the life of Adnan Syed, who at the time had been in prison since his conviction in 2000, the serialized format allowed each week’s discoveries to sit and percolate with the audience (and generated the sort of mad buzz that Reddit boards live for). Koenig exploited the inherent intimacy of the podcast medium to great effect: with her questioning voice in our ear, it felt like we were all in this together, week by week.
There has been quite. a. bit. of vital criticism on Koenig’s blind spots, on her unskillful treatment of two distinct nonwhite immigrant family cultures, and her lack of equal time given to the victim’s family. I would say that the very fact that the season generated those questions, and produced those critiques, argues for its essential place as a modern true crime classic. And that’s to say nothing of the “real world” impact the season had, calling attention to the prosecution’s shortcomings, spawning a second generation series of pods and docuseries about the case, and arguably having a crucial role in Adnan’s release in 2022 (though the status of his conviction remains in flux, due to what looks to me like some prosecutorial ass-covering).
So what does season 3 bring to the table that, for me, elevates it above the original story? I think it’s a mixture of legitimate improvements and my personal proclivities when it comes to true crime. Rather than following one story over its nine episodes, Sarah and Emmanuel Dzotsi (a co-host of color who moved back to his home state of Ohio for a year for the show), embed themselves in a Cleveland courtroom and let the stories—misdemeanors, felonies, manipulative judges, minor drug offenses and, yes, unsolved murders—unfold before them.
In an earlier newsletter, I talked about the importance of place in the true crime stories I respond to most, and this certainly fits the bill. Centering the season on one felony courthouse, in one American city, provides a frame for the ways the criminal justice system in many ways refuses to be contained in one place. It spills out into neighborhoods, workplaces, and individual lives in unpredictable, and often inequitable, ways. The final few episodes center on one juvenile offender, and through him, Sarah leans into the ways the justice system, particularly for young people, falls far short of its stated purpose to rehabilitate and reintegrate previous offenders into productive lives. In contrast to the open-ended conclusion of season 1 (which I was fine with but some fans haaaated), season 2 ends with a call to activism: putting the stories that have been told in the previous episodes in the context of making a case for needed change. Season 3 is the last (so far) of the Serial properties to bear the original name and host (with the exceptions of updates on Adnan’s case), and though I’d love to see more, I think it’s a fitting way to end a series that changed the game in twenty-first American true crime, and a brilliant launchpad for more and different stories to come.
P.S. In compiling these rankings it became newly apparent to me how very white the hosting line-up of Serial properties tends to be. What with the scads of talented writers and creators at both This American Life and The New York Times, it seems like there could be more of an effort to produce a “From Serial” series helmed by a reporter of color?