Serial: Audio Fit for Binge Consumption

On the morning of Dec. 10, Americans woke up to an unexpected gift. WBEZ, a public radio station in Chicago, had posted online the first episode in the second season of Serial, the hit podcast from the creators of This American Life. As word spread, fans scrambled to download or stream the episode. They fretted about a possible sophomore slump. They posted flash assessments on Twitter. And they expressed their feverish reverence, or studied ambivalence, for Sarah Koenig, the podcast’s auteur-host and executive producer. All of which felt entirely familiar—like watching the Internet welcome a season of Game of Thrones. It felt, in short, like television.

Such was the intention from the start. In 2014, Ira Glass, host of This American Life, a thematic, nonfiction radio show from WBEZ, announced his colleagues would be starting a series online. The weekly podcast, he explained, would be called Serial and would be devoted to telling a single true-crime story, chapter by chapter, across the span of an entire season via a dozen or so interwoven episodes. The show’s format, in other words, would be serialized, rather than episodic. “Our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series, where you get caught up with the characters and the thing unfolds week after week, but with a true story, and no pictures,” Glass wrote.