When a Title Turns You Off: Why I Was So Late To Review The Retrievals Season 2

What made me pause—and what it reveals about series titles—even when they are this good

This week I finished listening to The Retrievals: Season 2. I know, it came out months ago. I even got a heads up from a PR colleague about it before it launched. That was June.

The reason why I put it off, to be totally honest, is trite, bitchy even. But months later it reminds me how the small things matter.

Here’s why I put it off: I was annoyed about the title. The email that landed in my inbox went something like this: ”Just want to give you a heads up the new season of The Retrievals is coming out…this one is about C-Sections.”

Sometimes I have a problem with being too literal. The title: ‘The Retrievals,’ with the slug: ‘C-Sections’ just didn’t work for me. My mind was strewn with images of baby being “retrieved” from a uterus of a labouring mother, a procedure often performed under duress as a life-saving measure. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

My imagination didn’t help me either. I wondered if this would be about an evil anesthesiologist, more theft and fraud of pain medication? Or maybe go dark and profile someone who has pathological fascination of to observe women in pain, so they deny pain medication to women as they undergo emergency surgery to deliver their babies?

The Retrievals Season 1 won all kinds of awards in 2023, notably at Peabody. I also proclaimed my love for it on the Bingey List that year.

Out of protest, I didn’t listen. This was the first Serial Productions launch day that I missed. This was my loss, I now know. But it raises a flag to talk about other things.

The Medical Establishment and The System and The Unicorn

In Season 1, reporter and host Susan Burton uncovered an obvious crime: a nurse had been stealing fentanyl to feed a drug habit. No doubt the subject of IVF and childbirth touched a wide array of nerves. Hundreds of women send messages, emails, letters, articles and books to Burton. Some commiserated. Some shared more stories, books and articles. Burton began to notice another theme emerge.

Something bubbled up out of the ooze: not a crime, per se. Something that was much more widespread, and much less indict-able: women’s pain is routinely dismissed, but especially during C-section surgery, which also happens to be the most common major surgery in the US.

In Season 1, the women were asleep and thought they would receive pain relief, but instead received a fake medication. For a long while, this crime went unreported, or undetected—how could they know for sure they were also sedated?

In Season 2, the women are awake (by choice, to meet their babies), and are given pain medication, except it did not address their pain. The medication did not eliminate the sensation of cutting, the feeling of yanking, or the heaving and relocation of internal organs during surgery. This has often left an indelible mark of trauma on what was otherwise a successful day—this is not a series about dead babies.

More broadly, this season is about how The Medical Establishment [Heading 1] has dismissed women’s pain: underplayed it in diagnosis, conflated it to be something else entirely, completely misunderstood it. And then about how all of these factors have played into The System [Heading 2] to avoid addressing it, make new policy choices around it, or change procedures to address this oversight.

Burton narrates a series that’s screenplay-adaptation-ready

It arrives complete with its own Erin Brockovich character. Burton uses her intrepid reporter skills to uncover Susanna Stanford, the unicorn hiding in plain clothes. It didn’t take much effort, in truth to find her; she wrote to Burton after the first season came out. But it takes vision to see the Brockovich character as something more than a woman with big hair and short skirts.

Stanford is a patient, and a lay person, who went from circulating a small survey to a Mom Net group, to published author of several academic articles. By the end, we witness Change, on a grand scale, to The Establishment and The System, by this incredible woman who had the tenacity and bravery to stay focused on the issue, her issue, of women’s pain during cesarean delivery.

Many women, like Stanford, report that they still had feeling and sensation after the pain medications were dosed, during surgery. But instead of arriving the conclusion that the administration of medicine was faulty, or that the drug was incorrect, the conclusion was, on repeat, that the women were hysterical, prone to exaggeration, or just lying.

This concern over pain is what kicks off Season 2.

As the first episode began, I waited for the smoking gun, or hints that might lead to an elaborate courtroom drama until the jack-in-the-box until the Gotcha! moment.

Instead I was drawn inside an odyssey. Over a tight five-episode structure, the series deliciously mashes up the medical drama trope with the investigative reporter archetype. After the discovery of a unicorn of a character, the story is unfurled through a captivating narrative that chronicles something very few people are willing to spend time contemplating: pain. Specifically, and even more rare: women’s pain.

Here’s where I got hooked

The writing is stitched together in a way that provokes a forceful jump off the page. Burton creates an entire medical drama, a story-within-a-story, a technique that requires incredible skill in both writing and delivery. The narrator must be flat and emotionless, but also have accuracy and stealth emotion…because the narrator is also a character. It must be both timely but also lead the zeitgeist, while actively avoiding the fact that medical drama is an overused genre of its own.

This narrative device that makes Burton a character does well to distance her from the subject matter. This works for many reasons. First, it is the classically trained reporter’s goal to remove themselves from a story…something that has become much harder to do in the podcast world where me-stories reign supreme, so this feels rare and special. But also, for another reason; Burton does not have children (this comes up in the show), and so for her, she can’t even approach this on a personal, I’ve-been-there-too level—something that’s hard to avoid in this personal storytelling arena of narrative podcasts.

The writing plays with form and exposes the tropes, in a playful way that makes it fresh:

[Burton]: “The person hands the reporter an envelope of files, that’s a trope, but we’re willing to go for it here.”

What’s different: It’s multi-layered and it ends happy

The bigger reason this works is that it quietly mirrors the exact concept of this story—that the central character (the patient, but here the narrator) is actually very distant and foreign to the story unfolds inside the operating room.

This in turn mirrors the irony solidly embedded in this series: while the narrator unfolds the story, the use of the third person pronouns gives her distance from it. This is exactly the way these labouring women feel when they are delivering a baby through cesarean, without proper pain medication—undeniably present, but they feel distant and sometimes cold to the events.

Pull back another layer and it also echos the wider point that Burton is trying to make, for the last 15 years of her career: That sometimes women can feel distant or disassociated from the pain that they feel, despite the fact that it’s their own bodies.

And then on another level, this series is equally about consent, which is the unpleasant bedfellow of pain. Through the story of Susanna, this series calls into question the tests and mechanisms used in surgery to give, or imply, medical consent.

And then lastly, it’s about trust; women trusting their own intuition, trusting that the doctors will listen to them. But also trusting that the medical establishment is designed in, and can accomodate, their best interests.

Pain, consent, trust: three things that rely heavily on communication. And how this series ends is by showing us that a decade of advocacy, social science, community building and tenacity, on the part of Stanford, actually worked. Her message of consent and communication begun to show up in teaching hospitals, in procedure manuals.

The whole series ends an upbeat note, an oddity for this brand of storytelling. A story that begins in the darkness, but clearly moves towards the light. It concludes with Burton in the OR, watching this new form of consent-based communication between patient and doctor. And about how culture—and policy—has actually changed on Labour and Delivery floors at hospitals, at different hospitals, across the US.

So what am I still bothered about?

Should this have been its own series? Would it have survived on the shelf as a solo entity? Perhaps. Given the slower output of Serial this year, it’s not competing for shelf space like in the past.

Maybe the NYTimes/Serial also fallen prey to the “strandification” of shows—that concept that the Brand is the Channel (eg The Binge, Uncover, Slow Burn), and the Show is the Season.

But that’s not how they’ve done it before. Each show is its own thing (Coldest Case in Laramie, Nice White Parents). They were the last one, to defend the right of a show to just be a show. And not always a strand. Have we lost them too?

Perhaps it’s that the NYTimes/Serial has underestimated Burton’s ability to find a story that will connect. If they hadn’t, maybe this strand would have have a different name from the get-go: Pain: The Retrievals, and now Pain: The Blockers (that’s the wider term used to describe pain medication).

Burton has managed to create a voice that is unique and entirely singular inside the monolith of Serial. She has carved a voice out of the awkward silence that is women’s pain. She annotates this series without an ounce of squeamishness, no shrill inflection. This space she has created is unique and unconventional.

Her writing style and then presentation has culminated in something more. She has created her own trope, a convention to be used by others. I can see an editor telling their producer: Too much emotion, not enough detail. Go do a Susan Burton edit on that thing.

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