Then came Serial. Presented by Ira Glass second-in-command, Sarah Koenig, under the This American Life umbrella, it was a 12-part re-examination of a murder that occurred in 1999. Yes, 12 parts. So much so meh, right?
Wrong. The series rapidly clocked up a record-breaking five million downloads on iTunes, and was quickly hailed as the worlds most popular podcast. Even Radio 4 jumped on the bandwagon, gaining the rights to broadcast it simultaneously.
The Guardian called it a truly remarkable piece of journalism. The New York Times said it made plenty of us drive a bit wobblier and feel the occasional tingle of campfire-narration awe.
Sarah Koenig, the presenter of Serial
So, a week or two behind everybody else, I began to listen, allowing myself to expect great things. I even endured the juvenile tedium of the first few episodes, in the hope that something would click and I would see what all the fuss was about.
But I was sorely disappointed.
The whole thing was so smug, so petty, so low-brow, so plodding and voyeuristic and self-indulgent, that it set ones teeth on edge.
Lets start by just coming out with it. The series was badly written.
Now, I understand that the house style of This American Life is a colloquial, informal one. That is part of what is so refreshing about programmes like these. But Serial took it to a whole new level.
The script was written in the style of a college dorm chat, with the presenter regularly using words like crappy, and saying like on an annoyingly frequent basis. It made for a cheap, Junior High listen, which felt like an offence to the seriousness of the subject.
Secondly, the premise was bizarre. Why this murder case rather than the many thousands of others that happened in 1999, or any other year? Why should anybody care?
Id be the first to accept that compelling stories can be found in the everyday lives of modest people. But this disproportionate focus on a single crime, with exhaustive interviews with every single person involved, was, to put it frankly, boring.
Nothing new really happened. The story didnt go anywhere. Instead, the journalist picked apart the lives of a network of teenagers, gloating at every lurid detail.
It felt, as it were, like overkill.
Thirdly, there was a self-congratulatory preoccupation with the journalistic process. American journalism is renowned for its fact-checking, and that can only be applauded. But Koenig relentlessly foregrounded her own research, and made an unseemly song and dance about her meticulousness. Was this really about the murder? Or about her?
Last but by no means least, the whole idea was set up to leave the listener short-changed.
Was there ever a chance that a journalist would solve a decades-old murder? No, of course there wasnt. It was only ever going to be a journey-is-the-destination piece of voyeurism, and as such had little forward momentum.
Unless, of course, you were gullible. When the series ended, many listeners were devastated that their nave expectations had been dashed.
When I found out that Sarah Koenig had failed to find evidence of a smoking gun, I felt like a failure, wrote Rabia Chaudry, the person who first gave the story to Koenig, in TIME Magazine.
Even the Guardian, amid all the hyperbole, admitted in the end that for all the remarkable delivery, the depth and skill applied by Koenig and her team, its a more tawdry and voyeuristic exercise than the one that began 13 weeks ago.
Which in Guardian-speak means Ive been a fool.
For voyeurism it was, and voyeurism it was always going to be. Koenig said that the reason she took this case as her subject was serendipitous: Rabia Chaudry wrote to her about it, and she became hooked. But the truth, I suspect, is rather more cynical.
This was a case that had it all: teenage s*x, teenage drugs, a teenage high school murder. The point was never really to arrive at the truth. It was to join countless cheap thrillers and horror movies in exploiting that shadowy hinterland between s*x and death. This was Scream with quinoa. And the audience responded.
Which has partly answered the big question: why were so many people infatuated with Serial?
Yes, there was the voyeurism. Yes, there was the hollow promise, ultimately betrayed, of finding a resolution to the case. In addition, it appealed to an audience that had never heard of This American Life, much less Studs Terkel, and who were blown away with the novelty of the thing.
But I suspect that in the end, Serial just became cool. Once it was given the kitemark of approval by the trendy kids in Brooklyn, Hoxton, and other nests of hipsterity, it became a lifestyle accessory every bit as important as a beard, a sleeve tattoo and an overdeveloped sense of irony.
So enough already. Lets acknowledge that the emperor is unclothed. If you want to know whodunnit, the answer is Sarah Koenig.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11303390/Its-time-to-tell-it-like-it-is-the-Serial-podcast-was-rubbish.html
