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‘Serial’ Podcast Returns With Second Season

‘Serial’ Podcast Returns With Second Season

By Steve Johnson, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Season up, servers down.

That appeared to be the case briefly Thursday morning when the first episode of the second season of the hit podcast Serial was posted without advance fanfare on the show’s website.

As has been widely speculated, the episode deals with the travails of former U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, charged with deserting the Army in Afghanistan in June 2009. For the first time in the media, Bergdahl tells his own story, a complicated tale that morphed from a missing persons case into a returning soldier story into a political lightning rod.

The episode, available at serialpodcast.org and through other channels, puts the Bergdahl story in context, including a quote from presidential candidate Donald Trump saying, “In the old days deserters were shot.”

Attempts to access the episode on the show’s website in its first hours, across several devices, were at first rebuffed, suggesting massive interest. But that situation didn’t last and the website soon delivered the episode smoothly.

The episode begins with excerpts from Bergdahl’s 25 taped hours of conversation with screenwriter Mark Boal, one of the filmmakers behind The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. Their essence is that Bergdahl thinks of himself, first, as a whistleblower hoping to alert higher-ups to leadership he considered “dangerous.”

“I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing,” like a movie character, listeners hear Bergdahl telling Boal. “I saw things falling apart as far as my command goes.”

It has been reported that Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow have been working on a movie about Bergdahl. Boal’s production company shared its tapes with Serial and is a partner in Season 2, host Sarah Koenig says.

Serial comes from This American Life and WBEZ-FM 91.5 in Chicago. The show’s premise is that it examines one story in detail, week by week, like an old-time radio serial. Season 1, which became the first podcast popular enough to merit parody on Saturday Night Live, reinvestigated a murder case involving high-school students in Baltimore.

Serial is also available on Pandora, iTunes and other podcasting outlets.

©2015 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: United States Army via Wikimedia Commons

 

‘Serial’ Prosecutor Speaks Out, Stands By The Verdict

‘Serial’ Prosecutor Speaks Out, Stands By The Verdict

By Mary Carole McCauley, The Baltimore Sun (TNS)

BALTIMORE — The Serial podcast might be over, but the story sure isn’t.

Now, prosecutor Kevin Urick is saying publicly that he has no doubt whatsoever that he locked up Hae Min Lee’s murderer 15 years ago.

Urick is the second key player to come forward after Serial the phenomenally popular podcast that aired on This American Life, wrapped up the final of its 12 parts on Dec. 18.

In late December, former star witness Jay Wilds repeated his earlier testimony that he had helped Adnan Syed bury his former girlfriend’s body in Leakin Park in 1999 — though he changed some of the details.

Both Wilds and Urick spoke not to Serial creator (and former The Baltimore Sun) Sarah Koenig, but to the online publication The Intercept about what they knew about the murder of Lee, who was Syed’s high-school girlfriend.

In the first of two parts, Urick tells reporters Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Ken Silverstein that Wilds’ testimony, coupled with cell phone records, made up an air-tight (albeit circumstantial) case against Syed.

Urick claims that Koenig was “disingenuous” because she didn’t acknowlege until relatively late in the podcast that cell-phone records in 1999 were better able to pinpoint the location of phone calls than the equivalent records are today. The former prosecutor explained that if all the cells in one tower are in use, the call can be switched to another tower some distance away — technology not available at the time of the slaying.

“Koenig’s own expert states we were completely accurate,” Urick says in the interview.

“Koenig cannot dispute that, so she uses sleight of hand to try to call into question our presentation by turning the listener’s attention elsewhere, dwelling on irrelevant arguments and evidence while quickly skimming over the proof we presented of the material facts of the case.”

In addition, the Intercept article was unusually outspoken in its criticisms of the Koenig podcast.

“The show did not produce new evidence,” Vargas-Cooper and Silverstein write, “and mostly repeated prior claims, such as an unconfirmed alibi, charges of incompetence against Adnan’s deceased lawyer, and allegations that information derived from cellphone records is unreliable. None of these charges has survived scrutiny … The justice system in America frequently doesn’t work. This is not one of those cases.”