Serial and the Art of Storytelling

I have turned against Serial, the podcast from This American Life that has been sweeping the nation. Oh, I’m going to listen to every episode, but I don’t understand why a quick search of the Internet turns up only praise for this project. I don’t understand why everyone seems willing to accept it without question. I don’t understand why the discussion is only on social media, not known for analysis. News outlets and cultural commentary is on the level of the Pittsburgh City Pages site where I got the photo above, in a feature called “Stuff we like.” The only story out there is: “look how popular it is.”

For those who don’t know, Serial takes a single story and broadcasts it over the course of a season. The story is of Adnan Syed, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his high school girlfriend, back in 1999. He has always proclaimed his innocence, and the case against him was weak. Over the course of the podcast, reporter Sarah Koenig is reviewing everything and discussing the case and trial with everyone (friends, acquaintances, experts) and even reenacting some key aspects. It is predicted that it will run 12 hour-long episodes. And there’s the first red flag. Why don’t they know how many episodes it will take to tell this story? (More on that later.) (And yes, that is a reference to one of  Serial’s most common techniques.)

Actually, a search of the Internet turns up nothing but accounts of the show’s popularity and how many people are listening to it. There’s not much meaningful discussion of the form or content at all. If you want to know if people think Adnan is guilty or innocent, go to Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago, I spent a considerable amount of time on the Serial website blog and Facebook page. There’s nothing on there that’s worth much– a bunch of chatter and love for the show, and images of some of the pieces of evidence that have been discussed on the show. But that is where I learned that they are still working on this program. They are still interviewing people and editing and so they aren’t sure how long the series will run. Which is kind of interesting if you’re doing what Charles Dickens did in the earliest serialized fiction (I actually believe Dickens always knew where he was going and how he was going to get there).

I think it’s a real problem if you’re doing investigative journalism and presenting a “true crime” story. Also, Sarah Koenig might be a perfectly good journalist, better than average, but she is not doing a good job, in my opinion, of telling this story! Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what the story is, but really the story is suffering as she gets more conflicting information, as she tries to keep neutral, not project guilt or innocence onto Adnan. (She does not give him the benefit of the doubt ever. For example, despite the fact that her reenactment of the timeline for the murder shows everything would have to go like clockwork and the murder would have had to happen very quickly, she says basically you could do it. But really, it is so unlikely as to be meaningless to use that timeline to convict him. Why not just say that and be done with it?)

She is not doing anything that I expect an author of a story (or a documentarian) to do. She is not filtering much and she’s not choosing a hierarchy of experts, let alone information. For example, I am so much more interested and invested in what the lawyers from the Innocence Project have to offer than anything random people who were on the track team with Adnan 15 years ago have to say. Also, since when is this about Sarah Koenig? She seems to want to have things both ways– I am an objective journalist and I am a person experiencing this story as I uncover it. (for the source of the photo above and a story that continues to prove my point that the medium is the message, and misspells her name, click here.)

Serial, for me, is a product of the wired world. It seems to owe its form and life to social media. There are no experts, really, or no hierarchy of experts. We won’t hear a word from the police detectives (a shame, she says, but let’s just keep moving…). We won’t hear (unless something happens while the story is still being made) from the murder victim’s family. Though there is this interesting post from Reddit, another social media site where the show is extensively discussed, by someone purporting to be the victim’s brother. It’s the only negative “article” of any length I’ve seen, and the headline “brother slams popular podcast” doesn’t really reflect his comments– hey, he thinks Sarah Koenig is doing a good job! He just wishes (totally understandably) that she wasn’t doing it. Twitter commenters of this post by the brother say Sarah Koenig’s e-mail asking him for an interview is a good example of how to broach difficult issues in e-mail. Huh?

Twitter. Reddit. Facebook. This serial is playing out in a different world. (And if there is any critique of the podcast, it is a series of YouTube parodies that mostly make fun of people’s obsession with the show.) This is a world Dickens certainly couldn’t have imagined. I for one am not willing to just go with the flow and love it love it love it. I don’t want someone to pretend they are telling more of the story, the whole story, when really they’re just giving me what they could get. I want someone to shape the story before giving it to me. I want there to be a point of view that is not floundering around in the hours and hours of tape. Tell me a story.

And then there’s another question. Is it entertaining? Hell, yes. But is it enough for this story to entertain? And is that the right thing to do with a real life murder case? Is that something different than a documentary? Do different rules apply to fiction and documentary?

For more on that subject, stay tuned…