Serial Season 4: Why The Crickets?

Will it ever Gitmo better than this?

May 30, 2024

Aside from the flurry of coverage just after Serial: Season 4 was announced at OnAir Fest in New York City in late February, not much has been written about it.

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Great Pods has an archive of all reviews; most of the coverage was written in the first few weeks after the show was released, with the latest being in early May in Vulture; this coverage is an overview, not much critical analysis.

This year marks the 10-year anniversary since Serial burst onto the scene, but a full six years since anything has come out under that banner. Much has changed under the hood at that institution; chiefly, being acquired by The New York Times in 2020. Prior to this, Serial Productions operated under the banner of the podcast This American Life, whose financial structure is worthy of a dissertation all of its own.

In the last four years, Serial Productions has produced eight full stand-alone series, which is quite a steady production clip. They’ve brought new narrators into the mix (Kim Barker, The Coldest Case In Laramie and Susan Burton, The Retrievals), recast previous successes (Brian Reed, The Trojan Horse Affair, but now an indie), and along the way offered co-chair to different co-hosts (Dana Chivvas, Season 4; Emmanuel Dzotsi, Season 3).

The most recent oeuvre delves into the story of "one prison camp, told week by week," namely Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba. The 9-episode run began at the end of March.

Are we hearing crickets now?

Most critics likely received the same email from a PR outfit that I did one week before the first episode aired, offering an advance listen to the first two episodes. The rest of the series unfurled almost in real-time, as the show was still being shaped throughout its spring rollout. Were there interviews available? Nope. I asked, even though I knew the answer.

Given that much of the coverage was done early, it’s interesting that these early reviews were written without listening to even half of the series; this is typical in this biz. So what are we reading? Is this PR, or is it something else? To my mind, you do need to listen to the whole thing to write critically about a series.

And now we find ourselves at the very end of May. The entire season has been available for a couple of weeks…but…it’s gone quiet. Is this just timing? Or is it something more?

The challenge with Serial, as Crime Writers On reminds us, is that it will always be compared to itself—an undeniably tough job. Season 1 needs no introduction. Whether or not you quibble with how the facts of the legal case were told, its legacy speaks for itself. The phone call-heavy Season 2 felt like a reasonable response to the supernova success of Season 1: better call Hollywood for this one.

But they’ve settled down over there. It’s like they’ve moved out of the condo in the expensive area of town that’s close to good restaurants and nightlife and moved to the suburbs, with a backyard and space to walk the dog. Seasons 3 and 4 are impressive and vast works of deeply reported journalism. If Serial was able to one-up itself here, it did—they tackled the challenge of finding a way to craft a topic into a compelling story.

Season 4 continues in the vein of Season 3, which embedded itself in a Cleveland courtroom to explain the complex and flawed legal system of a city with a difficult rap sheet. This season explores the fraught issue of the US prison camp situated on Cuba's Caribbean shores, a site selected for its strategic advantage: near enough to be reachable, but sufficiently removed from American soil.

The most shocking aspect of the series to me was the topic itself

Sarah Keonig shares the microphone with co-host Dana Chivvas for Season 4, which from a straw poll is a bigger share of the mic than Emmanuel Dzotsi got in Season 3. Both co-hosts do a fantastic job…it can’t be an easy job to share, and from a producer’s stance, it’s not an easy calculus to determine how much to share the host chair with Keonig. It’s her show, she created this podcast true-crime journalist narrative style, but too much of one thing can turn sour. They smartly spread the spotlight around, which also preserves Koenig's appeal for future potential, should she choose to go there.

Serial didn't break this story. All the strange and idiotic and perverse things that make Guantánamo the meta-State that it is have already appeared in print. They have the benefit of hopping on the more than two decades of incredible journalism work behind them.

And in many ways Serial benefits from this: It’s not the first time I’ve heard some of the stories around the hunger-striking prisoners. But it was certainly the first time I’ve heard a firsthand account of what it was like to be force-fed during that hunger strike. The well-exposed media coverage softened the blow for me; had I gone into that story cold, my reaction might have been different. I had a visceral reaction to the Serial approach to this story; had it been the first time I had heard this, I might have felt psychologically harmed.

Serial is not actually a true crime podcast

Even from Season 1, the quest of the story has always been about some small aspect of the story that underlies the crime, except that that small thing is actually a universal thing, or a bigger question. The device they use to explore these bigger questions is the thing that we now love to call True Crime.

On the surface, Season 1 is about the innocence or guilt of Adnan Syed. But actually, this story interrogates memory…and the absurdity that memory is the bedrock for determining guilt or innocence in court. Recall how Season 1 opened:

[Sarah Keonig]: For the last year, I've spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999. Or if you want to get technical about it, and apparently I do, where a high school kid was for 21 minutes after school one day in 1999. This search sometimes feels undignified on my part.

Again with Season 4, the crime is not the story they are going for (and there are many layers of crime in the case of Guantánamo). What this series examines is where these crime/s have collectively led society, which is the present-day insanity of a never-can-end War On Terror.

They do deliver an adequate amount of shock value: Dana Chivvas spending a week in Belize chatting with Majid Khan, the right-hand man to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the recognized mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, was, truthfully, kind of shocking. Isn’t it the job of the podcast listener to imagine the journalist in the place that they are, as they report a story? I kept picturing her sipping lemonade and sitting beside him on a porch with a view of the ocean.

There was part of me that was annoyed that I had to listen to his backstory. Should I give this man my attention? Could doing this possibly be framed as a redemption story?

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Midway through the series, I wondered if Serial was self-sabotaging

There's zero percent chance that 300 million people will download this story, Season 4, and applaud. Our world is way too divided. They present extremely divisive politics and then go into the backstory for more detail. Army specialist Raul Sanchez; Majid Khan, the former right-hand man of KSM, even the ‘new’ warden, Mike Baumgartner…these men are all complicated figures. It will depend on which lens you view them through, as you form an opinion about them. While balanced reporting is proper and ethical from a journalism perspective, for this story at least, it’s unlikely to have mass appeal.

But maybe that was their point. To push themselves to tell a story that will never have wide agreement, acceptance or appeal.

“I just listened to the latest Serial,” a close friend of mine who is a lawyer admitted to me one day. Knowing him, this surprised me. So I asked if he actually listened to the whole series, and he said “No, just the last episode. I figured that would have everything I needed to know there.”

He continued, “There’s no way that these 9/11 guys are ever going to get a trial…there’s no judge that wants to decide that, there’s no President who wants to wear that mark in time, and there’s no impartial jury that could ever be found. This story will just fade away, that’s the best option going forward."

Is it foolish to frame a story around a crime, a concept, which cannot, or will not be solved or resolved?

Or is it a genius idea to frame an entire series around a story that cannot be concluded?

A million small conclusions can be found, from all the short stories buried in this series. But no grand narrative. No wide conclusion.

There's something refreshingly honest and upfront about her narration

It's breezy and connecting, yet states opinions and ideas with authority and conviction. It's like, "If Sarah says it, it must be true."

Part of this likely stems from the New York Times' oversight, ensuring every statement is fact-checked, especially in the post-Caliphate era. The material builds on a decade of reporting by the Times on Guantánamo, providing a robust foundation for the series.

When I compare this to The 13th Step, the runner-up for the 2024 Pulitzer, host Lauren Chooljian frequently mentions their rigorous fact-checking process in her narration, which was necessary, because even before they began the podcast series, they had a defamation lawsuit sitting on their desk. Because of the nature of the lawsuit, many of the sources for The 13th Step would not go on the record.

In some ways, Serial Season 4 has similar themes, in that it exposes ugly truths about how the American government rewrote laws to detain men at Guantánamo and extract information. Some people who appear in the story are also unnamed, which balances out the shock that some are named, and there for a full sit-down, such as Majid Khan.

Over and again, Koenig has the gravitas to breezily dismiss or point out disconnecting details.

From Season 4, speaking in Episode 3, about Ahmad, a linguist who worked as an Arabic translator at Guantánamo. His life was turned upside down when he was accused of being a “sympathizer.” But before she gets to that part of the story, she explains his approach to translating:

[Sarah Keonig]: The detainees would write of dreams, discuss stories from the Quran, which might require a high level of Quranic knowledge on the part of the translator.
So you don't, say, translate a reference to a seventh century martyr named Ja'far who flies with the angels as Ja'far the pilot, and thereby send the whole intel group into a tizz because they think they might have a lead on the 20th hijacker -- which happened.

Drawing an example from a previous series, look how she dismisses an entire police case in one cheeky statement, from Season 3: Misdemeanor, Meet Mr. Lawsuit:

[Sarah Koenig]: “Know what I smell right now? Reasonable suspicion. That Officer Amiat did not smell an unlit blunt wrapped in a baggie in Aramis's jeans pocket.”

My point here: perhaps only Koenig has the chutzpah to write and speak this way. It’s refreshing, sometimes funny, sometimes off-putting, but her personality is thoroughly enmeshed in the narrative. But as for wide appeal? Hard to imagine. But I truly doubt she cares.

The fact that Season 1 has gone on to be picked apart at the dissertation level by an army of fans, scholars, legal researchers, audio producers, and cultural theorists could not have been predicted. The case of Adnan Syed entered the psychic consciousness via the listening world. His case was re-tried, he was released and then brought back to jail. Serial dramatically changed his life, and he has his friend Rabia to thank for this; she was the woman who sent a cold email to Sarah Koenig that “launched [her] on [a] year-long…obsession is maybe too strong a world…let’s say fascination, with this case.” Voila, Serial was born.

Almost everyone who has listened to it, that being some 300 million people, has an opinion about whether or not Adnan Syed is guilty. For my part, I can’t get over why he stopped calling Hae Min Lee after she was dead. How did he go from being her boyfriend one day, to allegedly wondering where she was, but yet he never called her again? See, everyone has a theory.

Much has been said about the legal prowess of Koenig’s research. Also, how dangerous it can be for a journalist to claim innocence or guilt of a crime, on air. When Syed’s case was overturned in September of 2022, and he was released from prison (temporarily, as it turned out), Koenig had a clear party line about how she approached the case, which wasn’t necessarily about the question of guilt or innocence. It was more about how the justice system conducted itself in this circumstance:

[Sarah Koenig]: “That’s what we wanted people to think about: Even setting aside the question of Adnan’s guilt or innocence, are we OK with a system that operates like that?”

From the courthouse that day, Keonig reported that at the time of the trial, the State didn’t hand over the evidence that supported the theory of an alternative suspect. That, she said in an interview published in The New York Times, “was a bombshell.”

So much of this case fits into the wider story of legal mismanagement; how the evidence presented at court was unverified, implausible timelines presented at court as though they were factual, and then poor lawyering on the part of Syed who didn’t rebut the story presented.

And here’s where I think it gets interesting, because telling a story simply from the perspective of being wronged, or even to unwind all of the different bungled parts of testimony for a case that took place long ago in the past, is not super captivating. It’s very likely to end up with plenty of errors and omissions. Koenig was researching was a piece of history, after all. She was not sitting there in court day by day.

This new piece of evidence discovered when the case was overturned was that the whole story that Koenig presented—was it Adnan or Jay—could have been entirely wrong. Both of them potentially larks when compared to two other suspects, who appear to have connections to the victim, a motive event, and the location of where her car was found. So then, what of this story?

As she shared with David Leonhardt in the NYTimes:

[Sarah Koenig]: “What we were pointing out in our story was that the timeline of the case and the evidence in the case had serious problems. Which meant the people who convicted Adnan of murder, they didn’t know what happened either.”

A vague notion that the case presented in court was flawed is far less compelling than simply the who-dun-it conclusion. It was a device that was used to draw you into a bigger story.

No doubt that with the help of Season 4, Serial will creep closer to the billion-download mark (they are pushing 800 million now). It’s also likely they will be the first podcast to reach that billion mark. They defined this space, continue to push its boundaries and repeat their successes. But they haven’t done this through true crime. It runs deeper than that.