Yesterday I started to listen to the Serial podcast. Serial is a podcast that tells a nonfiction story week by week over the course of one season. For the inaugural season it tells the story of Adnan Syed, a high school student convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend.
Saying that the show is amazing is an understatement. The investigation/reporting that went into it is just impressive – episode by episode you discover new facts that make you question a lot of things: was Adnan really guilty? Was the trial held in a fair way? Were the witnesses lying? I find it amazing that it is possible to make such high quality reporting over a case that happened 15 years ago. I sometimes feel like I’m listening to a mash up of Cold Case and True Detective. Also the story telling and the pacing are wonderfully crafted and I feel similarly hooked to this show as I am to the series I frequently watch on television.
Listening to Serial reminded me how much I like this medium of podcasts and how cool it is to see new shows pushing the envelope and coming up with wonderful ways to tell stories. These are some other podcasts I regularly listen to: Radiolab, This American Life, The Entrepreneurs, The Stack, Globalist.
This article inspired me to write this post.