On Monday afternoon, Adnan Syed walked free after a Maryland judge vacated his 2000 conviction for the murder of Hae Min Lee, his ex-girlfriend, when both were teenagers in 1999. Syed exited the Baltimore courthouse to cheers – in part because many people have worked for years, sometimes decades, to free a man who has always maintained his innocence. And in part because Syed is a celebrity as the subject of the first season of Serial, the mega-hit documentary podcast that essentially kicked off the genre’s boom in the mid-2010s.
On the surface, it’s easy to connect Syed’s release to Serial’s influence as the bedrock true crime podcast. The show’s first season, released in 2014, did bring mass public attention to the case. It was downloaded more than 68m times in less than a year, became the first podcast to win a Peabody award and spawned countless imitators. Serial became part of the 2010s cultural ether – a lightning rod for discussions on the ethics of true crime investigations as entertainment, fodder for crowdsourced sleuthing online and an aesthetic touchstone for a certain media era. Host Sarah Koenig’s parsing of arcane details and soothing narration – journalistic authority cut with personal confession, grappling with the case in real time – became true crime podcast de rigueur. (The Hulu comedy Only Murders in the Building is essentially one long parody of the Serial-style podcast.) The NYPD tried to cash in on the true crime podcast boom with its own in-house production, Break in the Case.
