I spent six hours staring into space while laying on my couch yesterday. No, I wasn’t depressed or in a food coma or blanked out after a marathon video gaming session. Rather, I was listening to Serial, the just-concluded podcast from This American Life’s Sarah Koenig.
I’m really not a podcast kind of person generally, as if I’m listening to audio, it’s usually music. I don’t really even do audiobooks. But I’d heard so much about how great Serial was from Twitter and real life friends, that I figured I had to give it a try.
And given that I’ve consumed 10 out of 12 episodes of the podcast in under 24 hours? It’s safe to say everyone was right.
Serial has Koenig talking us through a very complex real-life murder case that took place fifteen years ago. In it, a young Muslim high school student named Adnan was convicted of strangling his ex-girlfriend to death, despite a complete lack of physical evidence or really even motive. Rather, essentially the entire case hinged on some phone records and mostly the word of one of Adnan’s friends, Jay, who told police Adnan told him he killed his ex-girlfriend, and the recruited Jay to help him bury the girl’s body in a Baltimore park.
Adnan denied any of this ever happened, though he has a fuzzy alibi given that the day was just another day to him, and it was hard to account for his time days, weeks and months later. Koenig has spent the last year talking to Adnan and dozens and dozens of people even tangentially related to the case to find out what happen, given that the case is just so strange, and doesn’t add up.
Without going into the enormous amount of detail the podcast contains, there are only really three possibilities by the time you reach the end (which I haven’t yet). Either Adnan did it, and he’s essentially a very charming sociopath that you only see in film like with Hannibal Lector or Patrick Bateman. Or Jay did it, and is blaming Adnan to throw police off of himself (Jay escaped any jail time for co-operating). Or a third party did it, but that makes little sense with Jay’s emphatic testimony.
The entire podcast will have your head spinning as new details about the case are revealed by Koenig, who often seems as confused as her audience despite dealing with all this firsthand. Perhaps she comes to some kind of conclusion in the final episodes, but so far, she’s back and forth all the time given how strange the evidence is for or against all of these possible options.
To bring this back around to TV, with the success of Serial, there’s already talk about turning it into a movie or miniseries. I’ve spent a lot of digital ink writing about how this movie, or that video game, or this book is perfect to be adapted into a TV show, so therefore if a like the audio-only version of Serial, I would surely love to see it in as a TV miniseries, right?
Wrong.
Serial exists so perfectly in this form of media, I simply can’t imagine it translating well to any other kind of storytelling vehicle. Re-enacting it with actors would be awkward, as we see frequently with cheesy Lifetime “true crime” movies, but even if it was translated into the world’s longest article, it would lose Koenig’s voice and her interviews with Adnan and the other people involved with the case. The audio interpretation is just spot-on, and I can’t think of many TV shows that would make me not move for six hours while consuming them.
I just don’t think that everything needs to have a TV adaptation just because it’s popular. Serial may seem like a prime candidate for such a thing on the surface, but if you’ve experienced it for yourself, I think you’ll agree with me that everyone should really just consume the original version, and adding visual re-enactments to things would not add very much.
Listen to Serial for yourself here, and you’ll see what I mean.
[Photo via Serial]
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