Serial is Back
Much like Season 3, Serial is focusing on one location and trying to unfold its intricacies week-by-week. This time, it's the beastly island prison of Guantánamo.
Serial is also a beastly podcast. It popped off with its first season about Adnan Syed, essentially birthing the modern day true crime podcast. Since then, it's become a production company and had it all be bought by The New York Times.
That means the feed is inundated with episodes and promotions from all of Serial Productions other shows1, which have kept the lights on in between seasons. It's packed with ads2. But the show is still good. If you liked Season 3 in particular, I think you'd enjoy this fourth round.
I think the two parter on Amhad Al-Halbi drifted a bit outside the core that is supposed to be Gitmo.3 I have beef with design and production decisions (see above)4. But the important bit is the story is good, honest, and fair. So far, I think that is the case.
Footnotes
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This does work on me sometimes though. For example, I just banged through The Kids of Rutherford County, a tight four episode show that is just buck wild. ↩
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I think dynamically inserted ads. I guess I'd need to cross compare to know for sure. ↩
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Not unlike how I've drifted from the core of just telling you that Serial has returned for a fourth season, by complaining about production nitpicks and practices. We all drift from time to time. 😅 ↩
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And below. The show notes in the podcast player are useless. They don't even have a link to The New York Times website where all of this now lives, which is precisely where TNYT wants you to go. The credits mention the neat diorama-style art (very Hitman GO), but you can't even see the art in the podcast player, because they don't use episode/chapter art. And because they don't link to it. For a show that was and is so popular to the medium, they aren't leveraging it to its full benefit for the listeners sake, the advertisers sake, or their own. ↩