How "Serial" Fumbled the Bag and Why I Respect It

The podcast that defined the medium was on its way to becoming the GOAT in true-crime storytelling, but that was never Sarah Koenig's goal.

Apr 09, 2024

Welcome to my first official newsletter! Thank you so much for signing up. It’s been a rare moment of sunshine in this rainstorm to see friends both new and old subscribing to this ~~silly thing~~ legitimate resource.

Let me give you the lay of the land. Today and hence forth, this top section is intended to serve as a personal check-in from yours truly. Maybe some behind-the-scenes, building in public, and a look at life lately. Beyond that it’ll be as follows:

📰 Top stories in the world of content with my own summaries and analysis.

✍️ The cover story, feature, or meat and potatoes of this newsletter. This is what I’m hoping you’ll come back for.

🔗 Some more linkage from the past week, ICYMI.

📈📉 A light-hearted and unserious look at what’s trending.

📺🎧📕 What I’ve been watching, listening to, and reading for the past week. For listeners of my old podcast, this should be familiar.

OK, I’m already late as is, so without further ado, let’s get into it. Be sure to leave me your feedback!

📰 Top 5 tl;dr

Meta Will Pay Creators of Threads Content If It’s Good Enough
- Meta is considering paying creators for their Threads posts based on post performance or the number of posts shared, aiming to retain users and compete with other platforms.
- What it means: With TikTok’s future hanging in the balance, Meta is seizing the opportunity to woo content creators to post more on Threads with a new revenue stream as incentive.
X Returns Twitter Blue Checks to Some Nonpaying Users. Many Don't Want Them
- Twitter has restored verification to some nonpaying users with large followings, causing controversy and raising questions about the impact on users' online reputations.
- What it means: I think Elon finally realized the value of verification symbols in establishing online credibility for notable public figures. It may be too late for some who’ve moved on from the platform.
Tough ‘Breakfast Club’ Interview With Eric Adams Illustrates Podcasting’s Unmet Potential
- The radio show interview with NYC Mayor Eric Adams demonstrates podcasting's potential for impactful, hard-hitting conversations, contrasting with more relaxed tech exec interviews.
- What it means: Content creators and marketers should consider the depth and relevance of their content to maintain audience interest and credibility. Ask the hard questions!
Gen Z and millennials say streaming costs them too much
- A recent poll found that more than half of Gen Z and millennials feel they are overspending on streaming services, with many preferring ad-supported or free streaming options.
- What it means: The data suggests that there is a growing demand for cost-effective streaming options among younger generations. Bundling and ad-supported content could make a comeback, imo.
Billie Eilish Has 110 Million ‘Close Friends,’ At Least According To Instagram, And Followers Are Completely Losing It
- The article claims she mistakenly added them to her "close friends" list, but I doubt that given the lift required to accomplish this and the publicity this story has received as a result.
- What it means: With 1:1 sharing becoming more of a thing in 2024, it’s exciting for fans to feel this closeness and authenticity with their favorite artists. This move is sure to launch thousands of copycats.

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Where were you when you first heard about Serial? I remember word of mouth spreading through the halls of 1 Hacker Way like wildfire. Working at Facebook, it was easy to stay on top of pop culture—not only because it was our jobs to review every piece of content that users and brands were posting, but also because my coworkers and I were extremely online. Still, I’d somehow managed to miss all of Season 1 until it was approaching its climactic episode.

I found myself utterly consumed, much like countless others, listening to the entire series in just two days. By this point, Serial had left several questions lingering: Who was responsible for the death of 18-year-old Hae Min Lee? Was Adnan Syed truly guilty? Was there a romantic involvement between him and the host/co-creator Sarah Koenig? What does Mailchimp actually do?

The distinctive piano-and-horn-filled intro music of Serial, the 'Global Tel Link prepaid call from Adnan Syed,' and even Koenig’s voice likely evokes a core memory of exactly where you were in 2014. This is not just because you were a fan or had heard of Serial, but because it marked a true turning point in media.

Serial was the first podcast to reach 5M downloads and was downloaded more than 135M times in total. It redefined the medium, partly by showing advertisers what was possible, but also by raising the quality bar for narrative podcasts. Really, it ignited the podcast boom and even contributed to the rise of audiobooks and the true crime genre. Frankly, without Serial, there is no My Favorite Murder, no Crime Junkie, no Only Murders in the Building.

Ten years after Serial’s launch, Koenig is back for a fourth season of the show, but news of both this anniversary and premier seem to have received minimal media coverage or internet chatter. How does a pop culture icon that inspired an onslaught of imitators, dually loved by fans and critics, simply fall into obscurity by its fourth iteration?

To put it succinctly, Koenig and her team fumbled the bag. In successive seasons, they strayed too far from what made Season 1 a sensation—perhaps even willingly. I will attempt to explain why content marketers know this to be a mistake, how it often happens in other forms of media, and why I ultimately can’t fault Koenig for taking this approach.

Social media is the ultimate testing ground for content. Users are creating content daily or, in some cases, hourly. While every platform and every medium is unique, ask any TikToker and they can tell you the best way to replicate success is to find what works, repeat that formula as closely as possible, then beat that horse long after it’s dead. What makes a TikTok resonate with an audience might be the format, theme, personalities, or any number of elements. This might require some testing and learning, but eventually one should determine what elements are non-negotiable and which can be subbed in and out without losing their audience altogether. This depends entirely on the creator’s goals and what their performance data shows about these KPIs. Testing can be challenging in a narrative podcast where a season might air on an annual basis and last 10-20 episodes. This not only makes testing and learning time consuming but expensive as well.

Take YouTube’s Mr. Beast, for example. He famously has an employee dedicated just to A/B testing thumbnail images. They get down to the minutiae like whether audiences are more likely to click on a video with a thumbnail of Mr. Beast appearing with his mouth open vs. closed. The thinking here is, nothing can be left to chance. Mr. Beast spends nearly $2.5M per video, so he rightly wants to leave no stone unturned to ensure his content will not only appeal to his typical audience but also to new viewers.

When it comes to replicating success in content, nothing is more important than the follow-up. Filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (aka Lord and Miller) know how to replicate success and it’s made them masters of the sequel. They’re well-known for creating bankable franchises like The Lego Movies and the Spider-Verse films. I’m most familiar with their work on 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. What makes these two movies exemplary is that they’re essentially the same story. In 21 Jump Street, the actors play police officers who go undercover as high school students to bring down a drug cartel, in the process making friends with students as Hill’s character fits in with the cool kids and Tatum’s find solace with the nerds. 22 Jump Street finds them undercover at a university while searching for the supplier of a new synthetic drug. Tatum befriends the jocks this time while Hill falls into the artsy crowd. The sequel grossed $130M worldwide more than the original. During the sequel’s credits, Lord and Miller even poke fun at the formulaic nature of the two films by teasing fictional sequels ranging from 23 Jump Street (medical school) to 27 Jump Street (culinary school).

Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but what Serial’s audience loved about the inaugural season was the true crime of it all. They became invested in Adnan and Hae’s love story. They wanted justice for Hae and for her killer to be found. It was investigative and suspenseful, it consistently left you wanting more. This is in stark contrast to Season 2, which profiled Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who deserted his post in Afghanistan, was held for five years by the Taliban before being a part of a prisoner exchange, and then was charged with desertion.

A full year after the inaugural season set records, Serial’s sequel had no murder mystery, no love story, no villain to be brought to justice, and no real suspense. In exploring Bergdahl’s experiences in captivity, the circumstances surrounding his capture, and the broader political and military implications of his case, Koenig took a hard left to the chagrin of most listeners. While the case was undeniably complex, the shift was so drastic that for many, it felt like a completely different show.

It brings to mind True Detective, the HBO crime anthology series starring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey as detectives in Louisiana pursuing a serial killer with ties to the occult over the course of two decades. The seasons of True Detective that followed not only never lived up to the hype of the first; they largely ditched the formula of two male detectives tracing a murderer who’s loosely mystical, as told with a series of flashbacks. This incensed fans so much that they took to “review bombing” the show. From HBO’s perspective, this is obviously not ideal, but the main problem was that the story changed so much each season. Clearly, some fans didn’t realize what an anthology was, but HBO might have been better off changing the name of the show because fans expected successive seasons to be as predictable as 22 Jump Street: two male detectives tracing a murderer who’s loosely mystical, as told with a series of flashbacks in LA, then the Ozarks, then Alaska.

While Serial Season 2 had the potential to delve into the captivating stories of the Golden State Killer, Tiger King’s Joe Exotic, or Making a Murderer’s Steven Avery, Koenig chose to focus on Bergdahl, allowing the narratives of these individuals to emerge in other media formats. Interestingly, Serial likely served as an inspiration for the subsequent storytelling of these figures. So, one might wonder why Koenig did not opt for a narrative more closely aligned with the original source material.

“I really miss the days when nobody gave a crap what I was doing,” Koenig said ahead of Season' 2’s release. “It’d be nice to just be like a troll in my basement again.”

Serial co-producer Julie Snyder added, “We’re really not planning on having the same response that we had in Season 1, and frankly, we’re really okay with that.”

In essence, Serial’s creators were not comfortable with the runaway hit that the podcast became. Sure, they hoped it would be successful, but Koenig and crew didn’t have aspirations of becoming overnight celebrities.

Ahead of Season 3, which focused broadly on the criminal justice system around Cleveland, Ohio, Koenig was back at it, trying to ward off the true crime fans and explore a new direction with the podcast, saying, “If you’re looking for a murder mystery, this is not it...We don't worry about it because you can't."

In this way, Koenig is a sort of Rivers Cuomo of podcasting. The Weezer frontman famously struggled with success so much after being thrust into the limelight following the release of the band’s debut “The Blue Album” featuring hit songs like “Buddy Holly.” Weezer pivoted away from their digestible, pop-rock sound to introduce a darker, more lo-fi approach on their follow-up album “Pinkerton.” With tracks like “Tired of Sex” and “Why Bother?” the album was essentially a “fuck you” to the bands newfound fanbase. Cuomo has since expressed remorse around the album’s creation and the ideas behind it. “Pinkerton” would eventually become a cult classic while the band would tap back into what made them successful in the first place, replicating their pop-rock sound on self-titled green, red, teal, and black albums as a sort of fan service.

But Koenig never found her way back to what made Season 1 a phenomenon. She and her team heard the complaints from fans regarding Season 2, but then took things a step farther in Seasons 3 and 4. Notably, Serial broke away from its serialized nature, going episodic while exploring more broad themes rather than the story of one person like Syed or Bergdahl. The recently launched fourth season tells stories from people at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay following the terrorist attacks on September 11th. If anything, the only common thread across all four seasons of the podcast is an exploration of the U.S. criminal justice system.

It's also worth noting that Serial is produced in collaboration with This American Life, a long-running radio show hosted by Ira Glass and known for its eclectic mix of first-person narratives. Notably, This American Life is also episodic. The decision to focus Serial’s second season on Bergdahl's story may have been in line with This American Life’s ethos of exploring diverse and unconventional narratives.

Ultimately, Koenig’s decision to pivot away from what made Serial’s first season so successful was driven by her discomfort with fame, desire to explore new creative avenues, and a deliberate choice to avoid stagnation. For that, I can’t fault her.

When Syed was released from prison after prosecutors filed a motion to release him (a move that might have never happened if not for the worldwide scrutiny Serial brought to his case), Koenig expressed surprise. Still, she said the “entire goal of her podcast was to highlight that an 18-year-old went to prison for life based on a story that ‘wasn’t accurate.’” Under this light, we see that her intentions were never fame and fortune. Koenig, a Political Science major at the University of Chicago and journalist, seems to have had the broader goal of bringing that exact scrutiny and reexamination to the U.S. justice system. Whether because of the murder mystery, the charismatic protagonist at the center of it, or the relatable young romance in the first season, fans’ interest mostly tapped out after one season—it did not extend as much to stories about the military, a series of court cases, or Guantánamo Bay.

My favorite kind of sophomore slump is one where the artist pushes back against what 'fans' want and says, 'This is me, this is what I want—take it or leave it.' Even if the fans decide to leave it, this type of approach is becoming less and less common as people pursue a payday above all else. I can never hate on anyone who is really going for it. That takes guts. That takes fearlessness. Not everyone has it in them. In a way, it’s what I hope to showcase with this very newsletter—writing about what I want to write about, even when the algorithms and 'thought leaders' say I should be writing about something else or doing it another way. As Teddy Roosevelt aptly points out in his 'The Man in the Arena' speech:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming…

I’ll always miss the Serial that most fans fell in love with. I appreciate what it did for storytelling and podcasts. I’m grateful to have experienced that moment in the monoculture. Everything that came after Season 1 just wasn’t for me. And even though Koenig went against almost every rule in the Content Creators’ Guide to Replicating Success™, I think she knew that and she chose to do it anyway. For that reason, I can’t be mad, and I don’t think you should be either. We have to move on and, for the most part, we have.

Sure, the smart move is to hone in on the exact elements that made your content resonate, fine tune it, and follow that formula for infinity. Lather, rinse, repeat while you collect checks. Not everyone wants to create like TikTok or the MCU though. Some people want to create something entirely new each time they work. I would say these type of creators are a dying breed. I wish there were more like Koenig who hold their own values and principles in such high regard that it guides all they create. It’s not easy to be so disciplined. In a world where everything we make is expected to drive the bottom line, to bring us closer to breaking through and earning fame and status, it is the “sweat and blood” that matters most.

🔗 More from this past week

Social Media

Content Marketing

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Women’s basketball
Cicadas
Bronny James
MLB
WWE
Earthquakes
Kristen Wiig
Larry David

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Men’s basketball
Easter in March
Truth Social
Fools
Fast food wages
Hot Priest

What I’m Consuming…

📺: Love on the Spectrum

🎧: Power User with Taylor Lorenz

📕: Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be

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