Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

… was more than a month ago. Why the delay? Partly it was personal circumstances: a dead hard drive, family commitments, end of the semester craziness. But more it was because I didn’t quite have enough to say to warrant an installment, as many of my thoughts were only partly formed, or contingent on how future Serial developments would play out before I wanted to commit to an analysis. My abiding sense that Serial itself was in flux as a cultural object made it difficult to write an analysis that could avoid its own wavering and uncertainty.

But now we are done, or at least the standard weekly release of the story of Adnan Syed on Serial has ended. His story is far from over, but the storytelling has stopped. And I’m left to reflect on what Serial was, and might have been, had it not been so wedded to its weekly release schedule and need to conclude before the holiday season kicks in. One of the most exciting elements of Serial is how it has seemed to be inventing its own structural conventions throughout its run, distinguishing itself from typical radio with variable episode lengths, and jumping onto the high wire act of simultaneously reporting and presenting astory. From the beginning, Sarah Koenig has said that we’ll be following along with her as she discovers the story, and that they did not know how exactly many episodes the first season would be. But the final month has felt like they were spinning their wheels, looking for material to structure each weekly episode (especially last week’s “Rumors” installment), even given the extra break for Thanksgiving, and finding ways to incorporate the miscellaneous new information that kept pouring in.

Despite its conclusive allusion to Dragnet, which made me smile, today’s final episode felt rather arbitrary, dictated by the desire to have a defined season of regular installments, and seemingly to avoid the counter-programming of Christmas and New Year’s. There is no resolution, with two court motions still in play but otherwise no change in Adnan’s status or compelling alternate suspects—the last minute identification of a serial killer felt underwhelming, making me yearn for an episode exploring that story and teasing out the many problems with that theory. Koenig ends by playing juror and acquitting Adnan, but even as bits of evidence may have swayed her opinions slightly throughout the series, I have no doubt that she has always held sufficient reasonable doubt. The ending of Serial, entitled “What We Know,” establishes that although we know a lot more about the case than when we began, the big picture is the same as established in the pilot: the prosecution’s case was not enough to warrant conviction, but no other explanation for Hae’s murder rises above the level of unsubstantiated speculation inappropriate for factual journalism.

I’ve been interested in how Serial draws upon conventions of serialized TV fiction, and there is no doubt that the podcast’s unprecedented popularity was fueled by those resonances. But in the end, I think those comparisons also highlight Serial’s greatest weaknesses. The producers fail to achieve the structural elegance that marks the best of serial storytelling, where each episode both stands on its own and as piece of a compelling larger whole. They tackled a genre of crime fiction where our expectations are always aimed at a revelation that will be satisfying and conclusive, answering the curiosity question of “what happened in the past?”, which is an unreasonable goal for an ongoing investigation to arrive at. They embraced a serialized form that has encouraged and even demanded forensic fandom to fill in the gaps between episodes, but did not account for how to deal with the ethics of fan investigation into an actual murder, and whether to integrate or ignore such fan practices. And by adopting the model of weekly episodes of a thematically unified season, they were forced to produce episodes without much new to say, and stop producing episodes before the story had finished unfolding.

None of these structural facets are essential aspects of a serialized podcast. Specifically, I wonder how Serial may have played out with a more flexible production and distribution schedule. There is no doubt that the weekly release creates a ritual of engagement that is hard to replicate, but after a few episodes establishing the hook, moving to a more sporadic release as motivated by the story and reporting could sustain that engagement. And why must the series end now, just because further weekly releases are untenable? Imagine that in two months you noticed there was a new episode of Serial waiting in your iTunes playlist, with an update on Adnan’s appeal, or an in-depth investigation into the possible guilt of Ronald Lee Moore. That would set Twitter ablaze, and renew interest in the series (and sustain engagement in anticipation of the next season). Unlike television or radio, there is no need for a podcast to follow regular schedules, as it can be updated and distributed more like software or blogposts. Fiction has long shaped crime stories to fit into the constraints of a book, a film, or serialized television—Serial has adopted those constraints for a new medium, rather than exploring how non-fiction audio might more radically reshape the serial form. Much has been said about how Serial’s success has made podcasting into a more legitimate and popular medium; I hope it can inspire more creative uses of the medium’s structure and serial possibilities.

I conclude here where I began as well—I think Serial is a remarkable achievement, and I found it truly compelling listening. And yet… I am left dismayed by the structural limitations it imposed upon itself, by the ethical considerations that it seemed unable to grapple with effectively, and the genre trouble stemming from marrying non-fiction content to fictional storytelling norms. I don’t find these flaws to be debilitating, or that my critiques are merely “concern trolling” (as I’ve been accused of doing). Instead, such dissatisfaction is the fuel that keeps me engaged—given the ongoing promise of seriality, we always hope for more, for different, and for better. While I doubt we’ll get more of Adnan’s story within Serial proper (although I assume there will be a This American Life episode in a few months following-up on the developing story), we will get another season. Hopefully Koenig and her team won’t try to recreate what worked this season, but rather explore a new story on its own terms, with new storytelling structures and less constrained possibilities for what podcasting may be. Regardless, I’ll be listening.

Previously on “Downloading Serial”…

I raised the concern that information was being withheld from us listeners to make for a more engaging narrative, and suggested that such withholding makes for great storytelling, but problematic journalism. After two more episodes, I’ve found that the question of withholding information has receded in my thoughts about Serial, replaced by another more complex (and I think interesting) question: when are we?

Before diving into the “when” of this question and tackling the topic of temporality, let me first ruminate on the “we”—who is being situated in Serial’s complex timeframes? Recent episodes have cemented my sense that Sarah Koenig is our protagonist and first-person narrator, and she is hailing us to join her in this story. Early in episode 4, Koenig makes this address clear: “If you want to figure out this case with me, now is the time to start paying close attention because we have arrived, along with the detectives, at the heart of the thing.” This moment stood out for me, evoking the kind of direct address common to 19^th century literature, the first golden age of seriality—it is Koenig saying “Dear Reader” to us, a phrase that Garrett Stewart frames as “the conscripted audience,” taking us into her confidence and accessing her subjectivity.

So Koenig is a surrogate for “we,” and like with most first-person narrators, we have access to her perspectives and experience, and lack access to anything beyond her knowledge. But she is also the text’s author, possessing a broader knowledge of the case than she is sharing with us—Koenig asks for our trust, assuring us that the details she leaves out (like the late night cell phone timeline) are irrelevant, and that loose threads (like the call to Nisha) will be addressed in due time. And still I cannot stop from wondering what she knows and isn’t sharing with us (yet). This tension is productive in fiction, as we wonder about the knowledge and perspective between narrator and author; in documentary, we are to assume there is none, or at least it is irrelevant.

But Serial relies on the tropes and styles of serialized fiction enough that I did start to think actively about that gap at one moment in episode 5: Koenig is driving and monologuing, deep in the weeds about reconstructing the post-murder timeline, and her fellow producer Dana Chivvis says, “There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib”; Koenig deadpans in reply, “Sometimes I think that Dana isn’t listening to me.” If this were fiction, I would seize this moment to explore the possibility of an unreliable narrator, where the investigator’s obsessions start overtaking her rationality and sense of perspective on the case, coloring our own attitudes and perceptions, with Chivvis signaling that we maybe shouldn’t listen to her so intently. Maybe that is what is happening, and the narration is clueing us in to Koenig’s growing immersion and personal involvement, but as of yet, her presentation seems to clearly earn our trust and confidence more than our doubts and reservations.

So if “we” are Koenig’s conscripted audience, riding alongside her as she works the case, when are we as the podcast unfurls? Temporality is central to any medium with a fixed presentational timeframe, as filmmakers, radio and television producers, and game designers all work to manage the temporal experience of audiences more than writers can do with the more variable process of reading. But serial structure is wholly defined by its timeframe, constituted by the gaps between installments that generate anticipation and insist on patience, where that time is used to think about, discuss, and participate in the web of textuality that seriality encourages—see for instance the robust Reddit thread about Serial, complete with fan-generated transcripts and timelines evocative of the “forensic fandom” I have studied concerning television serial fiction. So the consumption of a serial always foregrounds its “when” to some degree.

A listener-created timeline shows forensic fandom at work, but in the realm of actual forensics

Serial explicitly foregrounded its “when” this last episode, as Koenig works to walk us through the presumed timeline of Hae’s death and the alleged actions of Jay and Adnan. As she does this, the podcast constantly toggles between multiple timeframes: the possible events of January 13, 1999, the testimonies and interviews recorded throughout 1999 and 2000 as part of the investigation and trial, Koenig’s interviews with Adnan and others over the course of the last year, and the current weekly production of the podcast. This question of temporality is clearly on the mind of many listeners—Chivvis responds to listeners wanting to binge listen to the whole season by noting that they are still producing each week’s episode, thus “when you listen each week, the truth is that you’re actually not all that far behind us.” So we are situated at a similar “when” to the producers in terms of final product, but they are clearly far ahead of us in terms of the process of reporting, researching, and knowledge. (Chivvis’s post also highlights a dangling thread that I may pick up in a future installment, as I believe the rise of binge-watching in television via Netflix-style full-season releases actually removes the seriality from serial television, whereas Serial aggressively foregrounds its seriality. But that’s for another when…)

While I raised the question in my last post about the lack of clear structure, I feel like that structure is now becoming clearer. Each episode, aside from the first which has a more sprawling focus, takes a step forward in the basic timetable of the case: the relationship between Hae and Adnan before the murder, the discovery of Hae’s body, the police arresting Adnan, and now the reconstruction of the alleged events per the police’s case—next week is called “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” suggesting that the prosecution will soon rest. But the storytelling is not limited to this 1999 progression, as Koenig interweaves her own contemporary reporting, interviews, and reconstructions into the recordings and documents from the past. So we are always in multiple timelines, even as the core case unwinds with some structuring chronology. But given that we are left to live in the contemporary serial gaps each week, our anticipation becomes restless, knowing that the producers have more of the past spooled up to reveal, even if we are “actually not all that far behind” them in the present. I, for one, grow impatient to know what is already known about the past, even if we are not too far behind the process of audio reconstruction.**

So as I wait out another week to try in vain to catch up to the producers, one thing I will be ruminating on is the role of characters beyond Koenig. We are invested in learning the events of the murder and trial, but perhaps even more so, in trying to get a sense of who these people are and why they did what they did. Obviously we’ve learned a lot about Adnan, even without a definitive sense of what we know is true or not, but what about Jay? We still don’t know much about who he was before the events (not even his last name), and unlike nearly everyone else we’ve encountered, we know absolutely nothing about what has happened to him after the trial. Why haven’t they revealed that part of the story? Are they trying to protect potential twists in the story still to come, or to protect an innocent person who might be wrongly attacked by an angry listenership? Has Koenig talked to him, or has he not consented to this story? And what do we have the right to know as listeners riding alongside Koenig’s journey?

Next time, on “Downloading Serial”…

** And in a clear case of dueling authorial “whens,” after I finished the first draft of this post, I read Hanna Rosin’s excellent post about the latest episode, which raises many points similar to mine concerning Koenig’s role as narrator and journalist, as well as her timeframe in relation to the reporting process. But I assure you, Dear Reader, I wrote the above before reading Rosin, even as I write this addendum after.

I should preface this column by saying that I felt particularly hailed by Serial, the new hit podcast from the producers of This American Life. I have been an avid listener of TAL for more than a decade, shifting from weekly appointment radio to can’t-miss podcasts. I even remember the very first time I heard the program, as I was visiting a friend in Chicago in November 1998 and she suggested we tune in this fairly-new local public radio show on my car radio as we drove across the city—fortunately, the first story we heard was the unforgettable “Squirrel Cop,” so I was instantly hooked. Podcasts are my favorite thing to listen to while driving, mowing the lawn, or walking the dog, so it’s easy to fit a new one into my daily rhythms. And given that I have spent the last ten years focusing my academic research on understanding contemporary serial storytelling, this new podcast felt like it was made particularly for me.

And now that three episodes have “aired” (or whatever verb we use for a downloadable audio file), I think it’s great—each episode adds a new installment in the true crime tale of a high school murder in 1999 and the convicted killer who might very well be innocent. The structure maximizes intrigue as to what happened 15 years ago, and what might happen to potentially clear Adnan Syed from the murder charge. The production is as tight and smooth as TAL, making it sound like an established project that hits the ground running, rather than the typical startup choppiness of most new podcasts trying to establish a voice. So it’s definitely worth all the attention it’s been getting and you should certainly become a regular listener.

And yet…

I have some reservations that stem from its formal innovations. Serial’s titular use of seriality raises some interesting narrative wrinkles, as it applies the serial form to journalistic nonfiction in seemingly unique ways. There have certainly been journalistic series before, where a reporter stretches a story over multiple days or even weeks, but in such cases that I know of, it feels like the reporting is ongoing rather than segmenting a single story to maximize suspense and engagement. Likewise, documentaries like the 7 Up series or Paradise Lost’s sequels return to the story after new information or revelations develop during the serial gaps. And of course reality TV serializes nonfiction stories, but typically such narratives are contrived by design, rather than the high-stakes matters of murder and a life sentence. Serial producers report most of the story ahead of time, and serial their presentation of the material. (According to interviews, they are still producing episodes and doing more reporting as the podcast rolls out, but the bulk of the reporting was completed before launch.) And this creates some genre trouble.

Serial’s storytelling owes to other genres besides journalism, with an embedded murder mystery at its core. In exploring this murder, the program functions as a crime procedural, detailing investigations by both the police and the lead reporter, Sarah Koenig. In television, we tend to equate “procedural” with “episodic,” as the bulk of crime programs that highlight investigations focus on stand-alone cases each week in a tradition dating back to Dragnet. But the serialized procedural has emerged recently as a hybrid, tracing the investigative process over time on police dramas The Killing and Broadchurch (innovated importantly by Twin Peaks, which I recently conversed about on this very site). I’ve studied the use of the serial procedural model on The Wire, which dramatizes and serializes procedures not only for police, but also for drug dealers, unions, politicians, teachers, and reporters. This last one is the vital link to Serial, as The Wire creates an interesting intertext: Koenig, like Wire creator David Simon, was a crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun before moving into electronic media, and this crime story takes place in Baltimore County. When I am visualizing the scenes described on Serial, I reference the visuals of The Wire to help set the milieu.

Koenig’s role is crucial here, as I would argue that she is the main character of Serial, and this is where my reservations emerge. Obviously there is the highly dramatic material around the murder case, but the podcast’s narrative arc is Koenig’s own process of discovery in investigating the case. The first episode highlights how she learned about the murder, why she began investigating, and her growing reservations about the conviction. I figured that we would trace her investigative process as it unfolds, providing the vector which the series would follow. However, the episodes are structured more topically, with each exploring a particular aspect of the case in depth—thus far we have delved into Adnan’s alibi, Hae and Adnan’s relationship, and the discovery of her body. This last episode raised my concerns about the podcast’s structure: the whole episode centers on “Mr. S” and his unusual stumbling across Hae’s body in Leakin Park (which is visited and referenced on The Wire as “where West Baltimore brings out its dead”). It’s an engaging episode with great twists—he’s a streaker?!—but I’m left wondering how it fits into the larger narrative arc. Is this just a red herring? Does it help us learn more about the core case of Adnan’s conviction, or is it just a colorful digression to flesh out the whole story? And most importantly, what does Koenig know when she’s presenting this facet of the story?

Since Koenig is both Serial’s lead character and the lead authorial figure (or more accurately, functions as the inferred author), her knowledge is crucial to our narrative comprehension. If we were following her process of discovery chronologically, we would share her amount of knowledge about the case—even though there would obviously be a delay in the production process so that the real person Koenig would know more than her radio character would in a given week, we would at least share a linear process of discovery with her. Instead, each episode compresses the discovery over the past year of reporting into a presentation of that aspect of the case. This is much easier to follow than the messy procedures of reporting, where she was certainly investigating multiple facets all at once and only could make sense of certain bits of evidence in retrospect. But by structuring it for both clarity and engagement, I feel like there is a bit of betrayal to the journalistic enterprise, as Koenig and her production team are seemingly presenting information that they know is not crucial to the case, or that later revelations will problematize.

What is their responsibility in telling us what they know upfront? As storytellers, withholding information about a story to maximize dramatic engagement is essential. As journalists, withholding crucial information about a story seems problematic at best, unethical at worst. This conundrum of narrative journalism is compounded by the serial form, as the structural need to withhold and defer story seems to run counter to the journalistic responsibility to inform listeners. While I do not think Serial aims to deceive or mislead us, it does strategically refuse to give us the full story—thus far, we have not been presented with any other viable suspects in the case, any exploration of the crucial witness Jay and his potential role in the crime, or considerations of alternative motives, all of which have been teased as still to come. And yet I assume that Koenig knew of such information and possibilities long before she investigated the burial scene and dived into Mr. S’s odd history. Such deferments make for truly compelling storytelling that I am enjoying, but they make me uncomfortable with the ethics of this format. I get frustrated that Koenig is keeping something from me, feeling like she’s not playing fair—even though I often feel similar frustration about a compelling serial fiction, that’s part of the game for fiction while it violates the rules of journalism. How will this strategy play out over the course of Serial’s many weeks? Will my feeling that information is being withheld get in the way of connecting with the shared experiences and conversations that makes TAL and other long-form audio journalism so powerful? Can I resist researching the case to discover yet-to-be-revealed details certainly lurking online as spoilers (a.k.a. real life)?

These issues are still to be resolved—and that is my motivating question for this series of commentaries on Serial. I’ll post to Antenna on a semi-regular basis (e.g. when I have something more to say), and analyze this new form of serialized audio journalism in terms of narrative, medium, and other issues as they arrive. I also hope to land an interview with Serial’s producers to get a sense of their own procedures and goals in crafting this experiment. Just as Serial represents a new form of serialized journalism, I’m going to try to serialize an essay about the series here, publicly drafting and revising arguments as the source material rolls out. Both are experiments with unpredictable ends. Stay tuned and join the conversation to discover where they might lead.

NBC’s gambit with Grimm is reasonably clear, and compelling on paper.  Grimm is structured like a crime procedural and includes many of the best aspects of this genre: a satisfying goal completed and mystery solved at the end of the episode, a high stakes focus for the narrative arc, and a resulting brisk pace. At the same time its novel twist, that the intrepid police detective is the last in the blood line of the Brothers Grimm and has the unique ability to see the monsters who are hiding in human form which lends itself well to the series additional serial level; where the mystery of the protagonist’s, Nick, family’s past can be as explored as well as the secret of the shadowy group implied at the end of the first episode. While this balance is structurally effectively, I have some serious concerns about its ultimate ideological effect. Early on in the episode, Nick is in the precinct and sees a random perpetrator briefly shift into a monster, the kidnapping of a young girl and an assault of a college student (stock plots of more traditional procedurals like Law & Order: SVU) is also traced to the work of a monster. This conceit’s potential ideological effects are troubling, it moves away from a period in which crime was depicted more contextually on television. It isn’t desperation, class or neighborhood issues, mental illness or family issues that cause criminal behavior, it isn’t even anything as messy and complex as motive, inside a criminal there is simply a monster. Since the criminal is truly a monster, the protagonist needs to have no qualms about shooting him or her and the producers seem to find nothing wrong with depicting a man who kidnaps a young girl as effete (complete with hand needlepointed pillows, hummel figurines, home cooked pot pie and an actor well known for playing gay characters) if he also happens to be a modern big bad wolf. There is much to like about Grimm, the filming is excellent, the writing reasonably tight and the premise strong. As a Friday night show on a struggling network it may even prove a success, but until I see more to the contrary I worry that Grimm is indeed a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

ABC’s Once Upon a Time fits less neatly into a popular broadcast television formula and as a result has both more challenges and more potential then its NBC cousin. Once Upon a Time’s premise is reasonably complex, there was a world and time in which fairytales were real and Prince Charming and Snow White reigned. The evil witch took revenge on them by transporting them to Storybrook, Maine where they would not remember who they were or their history. They can only be saved by Snow White’s daughter, Emma Swan, who just happens to be a bounty hunter, that was saved by the curse when they hid her in an enchanted wardrobe, a portal to the other world. By a tremendous coincidence Emma is lured to Storybrook by her own son who she gave up and was adopted by the witch, who in this world is the mayor of Storybrook. Got that? Good because the complexity of its narrative premise might ultimately be Once Upon a Time’s achilles heel. If Grimm’s concept and structure can be quickly discerned how Once Upon a Time will ultimately unfold is certainly a mystery, which is to be expected in a show conceived by two former Lost writers. This is in some ways to the series benefit, while some villains are clearly defined our heroine, Emma, is clearly no saint and our saint, Snow White, shows the potential to be anything but. As a result, Once Upon a Time evidences the potential for moral ambiguity that Grimm limits. Even so there is a strange backlash undertone to a show with such a strong female protagonist. In her everyday human context, the witch is a single career women, working hard to make it in local politics, whose evilness is indicated to her son (also Emma’s son) by a lack of maternalness – it is important that his damning accusation is not that she hurts him or fails to provide for him but that she only pretends to love him.  Emma’s ability to save the fairy tale characters, and to transform personally, comes from her willingness to stay in Storybrook and bond with the child that she gave up. If you are still not convinced about the series strange backlash undertone Rumplestiltskin actually is a snidely whiplash like character who menaces Red Riding Hood and her Grandmother, owns almost the whole town and his last name is….wait for it….Mr. Gold. Despite this, the interesting female protagonist and the potential for innovation and interesting moral ambiguity makes me want to believe that these red flags will be less disconcerting as time goes on.

At the end of the day, I found myself disappointed by these two new additions to fantasy television. In many ways they were more artfully done, more visually beautiful and more narratively compelling then I expected, but, especially compared to their CW cousins, they were also much more ideologically problematic then I had anticipated. Fantasy has the potential to break the rules in profound ways. The fact that in this case it appears to be used to instate an authoritarian model of intrinsic criminality and backlash tales of bad mothers, mothers in need of redemption, and the sainted mother who martyred herself from the outset is disappointing at best and disconcerting during a time of cultural shift at worst. Nonetheless, there were elements of the programs that were promising and I hope to be proven wrong.