True Crime, But Different: A Year End Report Of Serial/ NYTimes Productions of 2023

A closer look at the trifecta of 2023 productions: The Coldest Case In Laramie,The Retrievals and The Kids Of Rutherford County

The New York Times publicly announced the purchase of Serial Productions and released their debut series Nice White Parents, almost simultaneously, in the early summer of 2020.

It was a big deal in the world of podcasting. But truthfully, the world was also locked down and socially distanced. It was also a time when multiple big-money mergers and acquisitions were happening. So in a way, it was just another day in the world of Podcastlandia. Significant, but not Earth-shattering.

From their initial launch, the rollout of their new series felt slow. The Improvement Association, about election fraud and cheating in Bladen County, NC, arrived a year later in April of 2021. This was reported and produced by long-time This American Life staffer Zoe Chace. It’s a solid series, but it didn’t feel massively different from many other TAL episodes, except with a longer runway, and a more complex story.

Six months later, they followed up with The Trojan Horse Affair, which arrived in February of 2022. It’s a sprawling series about a mysterious brown envelope that landed on the desk of a city councilor in Birmingham, England, about an elaborate plot for Islamic extremists to infiltrate the public school system. It’s co-produced by Brian Reed (of S-Town) and Hamza Syed, who admits early on in the series that he pitched this story to Reed over some kind of wine and cheese event, Reed the Keynote, Hamza still a J-student. This rather incredulously led to his hire in 2018 and the release of this series some four years later.

Taken together, from the outside, it did not appear that this new joint venture of Serial/NYTimes was off to a galloping start. They had yet to crush down new boundaries of storytelling content or hit the road to investigate a cutting-edge story, what with all their glorious resources at hand—one of the biggest newsrooms married now to the genre-defining narrative podcast team.

Six months went by. In October of 2022, We Were Three launched, which is a sparse series with just 3 episodes. It’s a darkly poetic and tragic look at a family torn apart by Covid, reported and hosted by another longtime TAL staffer Nancy Updike, produced with new hire Jenelle Pifer.

Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, as I reflected on this series it did feel like the ground had begun to shift under the offices of Serial. Updike is a familiar voice to long-time listeners, although most of her work seemed to happen away from the host chair. But this series felt fresh.

At three episodes, it was like the length you wish a regular episode was, but never achieved. It also showcased Updike’s uncanny ability to synthesize what Covid meant and what it was doing to us, while we were still trapped inside by it. It was a job that few could do, but Updike did, and did it well.

And then the calendar flipped to 2023

Suddenly, when before it had taken one calendar year to create one short and one long series (with existing staffers); this year three different series were published, each in the 5-8 episode range (what I call a medium-sized), every four months, with new voices, and new co-producing partners.

As I look back on this year of production at Serial/NYTimes, I’ve noticed a few things that are novel, intriguing, and possibly indicative of emerging trends in the audio industry. It feels notable that these have emerged from the same place, and largely by the same people, who helped to create, define, and lay the roadmap for narrative podcasts.

The Serial Year of Production kicked off in February with The Coldest Case of Laramie, about the long-unsolved case of the murder of Shelli Wiley from 1985. It’s reported and hosted by New York Times Staffer and investigative reporter Kim Barker, who lived in Laramie, Wyoming, as a teenager at the time of the murder.

Barker appears to be new to audio. Her written dossier is long and impressive, including a Pulitzer Prize from 2022. While this appears to be her audio reporting debut (that I could find), her gravelly voice and concise wit clearly demonstrate that she has got “it,” that ability to write for the ear, with a concise and charming disposition that makes you stand out in the world of audio.

The Retrievals arrived in June. It dives into the events surrounding the Yale Fertility Center, when a group of hopeful mothers experienced excruciating pain during egg retrieval procedures, only to learn months later from a letter, why this happened. And then, the horrifying reason for their pain. It’s reported and hosted by longtime TAL staffer Susan Burton, and produced with Laura Starecheski, who arrived at TAL from Reveal in 2021.

And then in October, The Kids of Rutherford County landed, which marked a slightly new model. This series is also co-produced with ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio, hosted by Meribah Knight, where she’s a senior reporter and producer.

The fact that all of the titles begin with the word “the” is about all these series have in common

But there are many more similarities, and some interesting commonalities, to consider when looking at the block as a whole.

Here are some of the more top-level similarities:

• They are all hosted by white women

• All of these women are journalists at the top of their game
  Entry-level requirements would be, at minimum, a nomination for a Peabody or Pulitzer, if not already a winner of these prestigious journalism awards (the exception being Susan Burton, but awards season is just around the corner, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see this as the entry from Serial Productions for 2023).

• All of these shows are women’s stories, which is to say, they are all made by women, and they are all stories about women…and maybe they are even made for women.

An Edison Research report from December 2022, The Women’s Podcast Report said that while women comprise 48% of the total audience, more than half of the women polled said they would listen to *more* podcasts if they were focused on a female perspective, and then hosted by a woman.

Women are, as the data would indicate, a growth market to tap into.

Is there a secret feminist agenda from Serial Productions? 

Perhaps. And to be clear, this is not something that I will complain about.

If you want to listen to men telling male stories about issues that concern or confront men, I don’t think that I need to provide a map of where to go to find them.

While it might seem like a trite observation, it is interesting to note that an entire year’s worth of production time and resources has been devoted to stories that engage women’s lives or memories, are uniquely anchored in women’s experience or a woman’s action. And they manage to do this in a fresh and interesting way.

I’ve made the point before that a feminist agenda is playing out in certain zones of the podcast world, so I don’t want to repeat myself here. But I do feel like the surplus of women behind the scenes at a high level, steering editorial decisions and making the choice of what lands the series, is worth mentioning.

Here are three ways that I think Serial Productions is shaking up the power balance, one podcast at a time.

1. Stories begin and end from a woman-centered point of view

The Retrievals is perhaps this is the most obvious example to pull; it’s a story that’s centered around a fertility clinic. The core issue here is how women’s pain was routinely dismissed and overlooked by an entire medical system, at the very place where you would most expect it to be uniquely addressed. The irony is intentional, it’s the neon yellow highlighter over the text.

Burton’s reporting has a coldness to it, which I think is intentional (this is sort of her beat). It’s clinical, in a sense, and her mild detachment actually has the effect of pushing all that emotion, or the ASMR experience that you aren’t keen to take part in, over to the listeners.

You hear this in the descriptions of how the procedures actually happened and in the steely deadpan descriptions of why these fertility treatments are happening in the first place.

She changes her tone during the in-person interviews with women who underwent this horror. She’s connecting and consoling to a group of women who are still traumatized from their experiences. But she maintains her reporter poise, even if she might have a deeper understanding of this experience than she makes explicit.

I asked myself if this series hit me differently because I’m a woman, and also a woman who has borne children? Yes, definitely it did. It would be impossible to ignore that fact. And I appreciate that it’s basically unapologetic about this.

The entire point of The Retrievals is to investigate the issue that women’s pain was overlooked and dismissed, by multiple layers of the medical system. The subtext of the story allowed me to make the connection to the fact that the dismissal of women’s pain goes to the basic inequality of women in society. We didn’t need to meditate on that point.

The series provides context and reflection on this angle, rather than the other option, which was to dive into the salacious details of the convicted nurse, the one who was stealing and using the Fentanyl to numb her difficult and layered life, at a rate that makes you wonder how she performed her job, drove a car and parented her children. 

When the Decision was handed down from the judge when this case, the nurse got off easy, it was a relatively short sentence to be served on the off weekends when her children were with their father. It was a light slap on the wrist, handed down from (white) woman to (white) woman.

The tone that Burton struck while concluding this series was notable; it was likely that race and privilege played out here. But as she wrapped up the story, which had the odd condition of actually knowing most of the outcomes of the investigation already, she also did not allow it to shadow the deeper focus of the series: how and why the pain experience of these women was systematically overlooked, downplayed and routinely ignored.

2. Taking down the “Mother Figure” Industrial Complex

The Kids Of Rutherford Country zooms in on a story about a group of kids, children from the ages of 8 through 12, in a Tenessee County near Nashville, who were arrested one day back in 2016, based on the memory of a 10-year-old’s analysis of who was present during a playground fight caught on video.

What began with a run-of-the-mill kids video, turned into a playground dragnet, where a bunch of kids were arrested on a vague charge called “criminal responsibility for another person,” which is another way of saying that students are being arrested for being bystanders. This charge could go so far as arresting kids for what could also be described as teenage antics: truancy, hair-pulling, petty theft among family members.

Knight describes the video which plays quietly under the track…some of the kids in the video looked to be about five or six years old, a point to which she glibly reassures: “In Rutherford County, they generally didn’t charge kids under seven.”

Most of those kids arrested were 10,11 and 12 years old; but there was an 8-year-old in the mix.

[Meribah Knight]: These are kids who play freeze tag at recess and snuggle with their parents on the couch and hold their hand when they’re scared…In other words, they are kids.

When you lay the facts of the case out, every part of it seems absurd, but to a whole new extreme. Throwing kids in jail on nothing charges and leaving them there for a few days—in some extreme cases, they forced some teenagers into what amounted to Solitary Confinement, 23 hours a day alone, in a jail cell—seems like it should be from an episode of Black Mirror.

What kind of monster could be responsible for this egregious miscarriage of justice?

At the center of this were two women: Judge Donna Scott Davenport, who oversaw the entire juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, and Lynn Duke, an overworked administrator who ran the jail.

In an effort to streamline their work process, and to reduce the after-hours calls from police officers wanting to determine how to book these kids, Duke created a policy, a “guideline” that she called the ‘filter system,’ which was a matrix for jail staffers to follow about when to hold, and when to release those kids brought to the jail.

On paper, perhaps in an annual report or something of the like, it could elude to how progressive Rutherford County was to have two women in these positions of power. It might be stated in a way that is meant to reassure citizens; with two women in charge, your kids are in good hands.

Davenport went long on this analogy. She fashioned her own moniker as “the mother of Rutherford County,” in what must have been seen as Christian value to offer these kids a chance to ‘straighten them out,’ and ‘teach them a lesson.’ She dolled out sentences and moved some forward into a probation system; it was like some extreme version of making sure these delinquents were “scared straight.”

Except of course, that this was real jail, and not a television show concept. These kids were booked into the system. For many of them, finding a way out proved difficult.

It should be noted that the overwhelming majority of the kids that Judge Davenport introduced to the justice system at these tender young ages were black and brown kids. Judge Davenport is a white woman.

When the story about the video hit the newspaper, two aspiring Public Defenders, young lawyers who understood both sides of the courtroom, discovered this story, they thought they had found a way to finally expose the system they knew was corrupt and broken.

But what these lawyers discovered was that justice wasn’t exactly a straight line. A lawsuit was filed which they eventually won. The County agreed to pay, but only after a set of challenging conditions were met by the defendants. This meant that much of the money that was supposed to be paid out to the victims actually went back into County coffers.

Finally, the case ends. The kids that can be found are paid out, and the system of illegally detaining children ends. The policies were changed. But what of the people who put this system into place, and rigorously maintained its existence?

As the series begins its closing arguments, we hear that Judge Davenport decides not to run for another term, and instead slip quietly off into retirement. Lynn Duke still holds in her position.

Knight interviews a County official named Jeff who says something like: “Mistakes were made during the Judicial process…we weren’t aware it was happening. The Juvenile Detention Center was not aware that they were breaking the law.”

When Knight presses him in an interview about who was responsible, where they could lay blame, and who would accept responsibility for this? He responds:

“They’re dedicated civil servants out there, whose lives might be affected by saying something negative about this case… about them, and their job, and how they conduct their professional life.”

And because of that, he just doesn’t think it’s fair to point the finger.

Power here, it would appear, is only briefly dispersed and allocated to others. The “Mothers” seemed to catch a break, but the “Mothers” also did not atone.

The Kids of Rutherford County shines a light on the privilege that some women hold as they cling to power; the gendered assumption that because they are women, they are being kind and generous, and always doing the right thing for children.

3. It’s ok not to solve the crime in a true crime series

The Coldest Case in Laramie is a story about the murder of Shelli Wiley, who was attacked in her bedroom and then chased outside, stabbed several times on a public sidewalk in the early hours of the night, then dragged some 40 feet along a road, presumably back into her apartment building which was later set on fire. Somewhat implausibly, 40 years on, there were no witnesses and it remains an unsolved murder.

Kim Barker, reporter and host of the series, has an odd connection to the story, given that she was also living in that mountain town at the time of the murder. This makes her an ideal candidate to walk us through this case.

At first, following the well-let pathway of a true crime podcast, Barker sets out to try to solve the case. She goes back to the town, to the scene of the crime. She tracks down the surviving family. She calls the new Detective who is still working the case. She attempts to connect with the the main suspect, a retired former police officer named Fred Lamb, who was arrested, and then released. But in a critical juncture, the defense lawyer for Lamb, Vaughn Neubauer, did call her back. He was willing to talk.

In a move that distinctly changed the direction of this narrative, the lawyer offered to hand over all the case files to Barker. Meaning: boxes and binders; details of evidence; transcripts from interviews; and pivotally, audio recordings of the interrogations.

Barker was shocked. In decades of pursuing cases like this one, no lawyer had ever shared *all* the files. It was a big break, and Barker must have thought she had this one in hand, a moment of unbridled optimism that she could crack the case. But that’s not exactly what happened.

Many true crime podcasts set out to achieve the impossible—they take a case with ambiguity and work to expose one truth. They want to answer who-dun-it, or uncover a miscarriage of justice, or get a chance to finally prove how the detectives or the police had failed the case back in the moment. It’s an act of exteme bravado.

Sometimes the pathway to the true killer isn’t so easy to find. Lizzie O’Leary wrote in Slate that while some podcasts end up in a “hand-wavy meditation,” others offer a solid conclusion (here lauding The Retrievals for providing a conclusion that women’s pain is just not treated equally because women are not equal).

But I think the difference between not solving a crime and offering truisms about the flawed nature of humanity, to then admitting how and why Barker can’t solve the crime. I like that it completely removes the superhero vest from the podcast chair, as if to say: See, I can’t do this either. It’s humble. It’s human and it’s honest.

Serial Season 1 has been accused of this. In the wake of not providing a satisfactory answer, an indisputable answer to who killed Hae Min Lee, a veritable cottage industry of Adnan Syed-crime-solvers has sprouted up in the hay fields next to the prison where he once resided. There’s a whole other deluge of re-listen podcasts that posit alternative theories or poke holes in the case that Sarah Koenig presented.

After years of looking and thousands of pages read, Barker had to admit: She was stumped. She thought she knew, twice, and proceeded to lay out all the facts. And then right away, she takes apart her own evidence to conclude—nothing. No answer.

To admit defeat is kind of big, and under the umbrella of the NYTimes no less, that a reporter spent years on a story, only to end up with more or less the same facts that appeared in the shoddy police reports. 

Why? Because humans are unreliable narrators. Because we have fallible memories, which are keen to make up facts that tell a story that makes us feel better. Because much time has passed, and that mixed with some pretty sub-standard police work, when combined with the years passed, does not age well. What we are left with, effectively, is a stale-dated murder case that seems unlikely to achieve resolution any time soon.

So many true crime stories force a conclusion. They come down on one side of the law. Barker’s conclusion is remarkably humble. Instead of hanging her hat on one of the plausible theories, she backs off, saying that although she thought she knew, actually, she’s not so sure.

Bingeworthy Awards For The Serial/NYTimes Year End:

BEST SCENE TAPE

The Kids Of Rutherford County

Episode 4: Dedicated Public Servants

Knight goes for a “ride along” with the lawyers to try to find The Grand Prize Winner, the kid who should net $50,000 from the case they brought against the county. But they can’t find him. This tape puts you in the moment brilliantly.

BEST NARRATARTION WRITING

Kim Barker, The Coldest Case Of Laramie: Episode 1

Kim Barker evokes a bit of Kim Wexler, from Better Call Saul.

The way that Barker lays out the facts and the timelines says almost everything it needs to say, in just a few short words:

[KIM BARKER]: One of Shelley’s brothers started drinking after Shelli’s death. He never stopped. He died shortly before my first conversation with Lori and Brandy (sister and niece of Shelli).

When I asked Shelli‘s family about her, what she was like, who she was, they tended to lean on the platitudes of the long dead.

She lit up a room with her smile.

She was smart, beautiful inside and out.

Most Innovative Narrative

The Retrievals

This series somehow made me feel something as I listened. Specifically, it made me feel pain as I listened to the descriptions of the procedures. As I heard the stories of what these women went through, as the women walked through what it was in the moment, and what this all means to them now in their lives, I physically winced. This was done through a mixture of narrative tone, smart story editing, and an impartial, bordering on clinical narrator, who talked through the events in a step-by-step way. This is the first time I’ve had this experience.

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