WHEN IS THE NEW SERIAL PODCAST SEASON 3 SERIAL
So the Serial team pivots from taking up another extraordinary case - as they did again with the second season, which centered on the mysterious kidnapping of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan - and shifts its focus towards documenting, decoding, and dissecting the ordinary everyday of the American criminal justice system using Cleveland as its site of investigation. By virtue of its extraordinariness, Koenig argues, Syed’s case can tell only us so much.
WHEN IS THE NEW SERIAL PODCAST SEASON 3 TRIAL
The answer is that cases like that one, they are not what fills America’s courtrooms everyday.” She goes on to explain that Adnan Syed, the imprisoned Baltimore man at the center of Serial’s first season, was charged with a first-degree murder with no prior criminal record, that his family hired an expensive lawyer, and his case eventually went to trial - an extremely rare occurrence. “People have asked me and the people I work with the question: What does this case tell us about the criminal justice system?” host Sarah Koenig narrates in the opening minutes. That conundrum drives this new Serial season, which immediately evokes its own contribution to the mess given the insane surprise popularity of its original 2014 run. After all, issues aren’t always defined by their edge cases, in much the same way that people aren’t always defined by their highest of highs or lowest of lows.
But while those stories are usually attention-grabbing, anger-provoking, and painfully salacious, there may well be distinct limits to what they actually tell us about the criminal justice system. In The Dark’s second season is a representative example of this, as its case revolved around a black man in Mississippi who was tried six times by the same white attorney for a crime he might not have committed. (Of course, the question of who constitutes the “we” is always and rightfully a subject of debate, meditation, and criticism.) But the most noteworthy of these works tend to deal with extraordinary cases in order to bring attention to the strangeness and the failures of the systems that are meant to support us. These works find value in mining the gap between how the world works and how we think it works - or rather, how we think it should work. The surreality is often key to crime journalism, novels, documentaries, podcasts, and legal dramas like The Good Fight. (A judge’s relative may get a lighter sentence than a non-relative for the exact same crime, for example.) The Justice Center might serve as the bureaucratic layer for the city of Cleveland, but as we’re introduced to its hallways and brutalist architecture, the world contained within can feel strange and obscene to the citizens outside of it. Deals are cut and sentences negotiated in sometimes illogical and unfair ways. Lawyers clash, collude, and commiserate with judges, clients, and each other. Serial presents the Justice Center as an intense web of detail with characters, codes, histories, relationships, ugly buildings, an entire universe unto itself. The ding of elevators, the crunch of boots, the implicit power of the building’s literal structure: These are the little details that turn a setting into a scene, a place into a world. The main court tower is 26 stories high, so the elevator really runs the place.” Roughly speaking, the building functions like most hierarchies: Vertically, in this case, from the bowels up.
“The city and county courts, the county jail, the prosecutor’s offices, the Sheriff’s office, and headquarters for the Cleveland police. “The Justice Center houses, in location, everything a justice system needs,” she narrates. Koenig, who will split hosting duties this season with This American Life staffer Emmanuel Dzotsi, takes just under 25 seconds in the opening minutes to vividly establish Cleveland’s Justice Center, which serves as the hub of stories for the season. The podcast’s highly anticipated third season opens, as it always does, with Sarah Koenig’s narration, once again lyrical and surprising and wildly economical. It’s such a pleasure to listen to Serial again.
Photo: Moth Studio and Adam Maida/Courtesy of SERIAL
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