Today, after nearly three months, Serial reaches its dramatic conclusion. And whether Sarah Koenig and company bring us closure or just leave us in the lurch Sopranos-style, one storyline is sure to be continued: Has Serial changed the game for "longform" podcasting?
Podcasters like Koenig don’t think this way, of course. What they do—whether it’s 15 minutes or an entire hour devoted to a single story—is simply well-reported, narrative journalism. Make no mistake, though, Serial is different. The complicated tale of Adnan Syed is a single, multi-faceted story that’s told over the course of 12 weeks, similar to narratives we’ve seen fictionalized on TV for years. If that’s such a great way to tell a story, why is Serial seemingly the first podcast to do it?
“The status quo is self-contained reported pieces, though every once in awhile you’d get something like ‘Harper High School’ from This American Life, which is amazing, semi-serialized journalism,” says Alex Kapelman, producer and co-founder of popular music podcast Pitch. “Shows like Welcome to Night Vale are doing it in terms of fiction, and StartUp just started doing it with their thing. But I don’t think anyone thought of it [serialization] in that way before. It’s simple, yet really revolutionary.”
Serialization wouldn’t be the first subtle change to send ripples through podcasting. And when such ideas surface, people pay attention. “This American Life has a ton of producers, and many people—myself included—listened to it and said 'this is a way to make a story,'” says Whitney Jones, Pitch’s co-producer and co-founder. “When Radiolab came on, there was a new crop of dual-hosted shows, two people going back and forth like Jad and Robert. So whatever’s popular will of course spawn shows with the same basic concepts.”
If we’re about to enter a generation of “next week on” podcast teasers, it continues a cyclical journey for audio. “Once upon a time this was the most popular form of entertainment in the country,” says Robert Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture. When families gathered round the radio for primetime entertainment, serialized audio was king. Programs even had standardized run times to cater to advertising like modern TV. “Before TV develops in the 1940s, radio did cop shows, sci-fi, soap operas, game shows, reality shows—everything that’s on TV now.”
But TV did develop, offering similarly gripping stories with pictures, and radio lost its appointment-entertainment crown. The medium transitioned from fiction toward music or talk (largely sports and politics) and quick-hitting news bits that could be played again and again, snaring listeners whenever they happened to tune in.
Today, appointment entertainment itself is slowly going away. And in an on-demand world, visuals are no longer a trump card. Catching up on last week’s Bob’s Burgers is fine for the waiting room, but audio stories fit better for the commute or doing the dishes. Podcasts filled a new niche and exploded within it; Serial’s merely doing it better.
“So as people discovered that podcasts can be compelling in their regular media consumption, maybe we should’ve seen Serial coming from a mile away,” Thompson says. “As podcasts get more and more sophisticated, of course one is going to say ‘Wow, look at Fargo, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos—look at all these great stories being spread out and talked about before the next episode comes. Why not do it with a podcast?’ It seems so inevitable.”
Many of Thompson's students have aspirations of being directors or showrunners on the next great HBO series, but more and more he tells them audio storytelling is what has great potential. They aren’t the only ones receiving this message. “There are definitely conversations taking place about Serial,” says Jessie Landerman, a second year Master's student in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “The show’s pushing people to think more creatively about advocacy strategies; it’s giving credit to the power of storytelling.”
Landerman herself is no exception. After a friend turned her on to Serial, she considered changing the entire focus of her thesis to a longform audio documentary. She was always a documentarian—she made short online advocacy films and taught at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies before her current coursework—but her work was strictly visual. That meant that some stories had to be put on hold, like the tale of Landerman’s sister, an attorney working pro bono for a death row inmate out of her commitment to the man’s innocence.
“I always come back to this story as one that I've wanted to tell, but I've struggled with the fact that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to tell this story visually," she says. "I'd either have to do reenactments, dig up old photos and newspaper clippings to glide across the screen or rely heavily on talking head interviews. None of that satisfied me. When I started listening to Serial, of course I immediately thought of this. It seemed like the solution to my problem—tell the story with audio.”
Unfortunately the show came along a little too late; Landerman was well into her current thesis project (it’s about data analytics for organizing in the developing world). But for those already in the podcasting world and those about to enter, Serial creates new possibilities. Serialization may have always existed, but this show demonstrates that an audio-only audience is not only open to it, they crave it. Apple has said Serial is the fastest podcast ever to five million downloads, and according to the Wall Street Journal it averages 1.26 million downloads per episode.
So for current shows like Kapelman and Jones’s Pitch, there's more to talk about for next season.
“Whitney and I discussed doing some sort of serialized thing next season—we’d have an overarching theme for the pieces that is serialized, but everything else would be modular,” Kapelman says. “It’s the very beginning of us talking about it; it may not happen. But the fact that different people are paving the way for serialized narrative journalism opens up a new realm of possibilities, and that’s really exciting.”
