The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age

Ellen McCracken, Ellen McCracken

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351810470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

This volume analyzes the Serial podcast, situating it in the trajectory of other popular crime narratives and contemporary cultural theory. Contributors focus on topics such as the ethics of the use of fiction techniques in investigative journalism, the epistemological overlay of postmodern indeterminacy, and the audience's prolific activity in social media, examining the competing narrative strategies of the narrators, characters, and the audience. Other topics considered include the multiplication of narratives and the longing for closure, how our minds work as we experience true crime narratives, and what critical race theory can teach us about the program's strategies.

1
The Ethics of Serialized True Crime

Fictionality in Serial Season One

Erica Haugtvedt

On its website, Serial claims to tell

one story—a true story—over the course of a season. Each season, we follow a plot and characters wherever they take us. We won’t know what happens at the end until we get there, not long before you get there with us. Each week we bring you the next chapter in the story, so it’s important to listen to the episodes in order.

(“About Serial”)

Serial’s audience is thus primed to expect a story with characters and a plot, for which it is important to listen in order, serially. A plot and characters—for true crime? Sarah Koenig doesn’t chronicle characters; she chronicles people—and the tension between these two categories produces one of the ethical dilemmas at the heart of Serial.

Starting in October 2014, Serial distributed twelve approximately weekly podcasts during its first season. Throughout these episodes, Koenig re-covers the case of Hae Min Lee’s murder on January 13, 1999, for which Hae’s seventeen-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted (Koenig “The Alibi”). Adnan’s acquaintance, Jay, testified in court that Adnan killed Hae in anger over their breakup; Jay claimed to have helped Adnan bury Hae’s body. Witnesses contradict each other, evidence seems to have been missing or overlooked, and Koenig presents the competence of Adnan’s defense lawyer as dubious.

The podcast, which is sometimes monotonously pedantic about the details of the years-old case it chronicles, was unexpectedly popular: CNN estimated that the podcast had been downloaded forty million times as of December 23, 2014 (Roberts). As its title suggests, Serial’s success is due in no small part to its serial storytelling strategies. The podcast elucidates the capacities of serial form to attract and maintain a dedicated, and even obsessed, audience. The reception of the first season is partially captured in a dedicated discussion forum, called a subreddit, on the website Reddit. Fans speculate on the Serial subreddit, sometimes further investigating the leads that Koenig provided. Yet the subreddit runs into trouble when fans discover how easy it is to access the full names and social media accounts of the persons involved in the case. Even as the subreddit, like its host website Reddit, has policy against “doxing”—providing personal information and documents about people who wish to remain private—this policy is difficult to enforce in an online forum regularly flooded with contributions.

When fannish curiosity crosses into violating the privacy of witnesses in the present day, it becomes emphatically clear that Serial is dealing not with characters but with people whose real lives many years after the crime are invaded by the fandom Serial cultivates. Serial, therefore, fulfills the potential of its serial narrative form—a form that first realized its potency in the Victorian period, when true crime was serially narrated to similarly obsessive effects. When This American Life serialized Serial, it did not seem prepared for the consequences. But given the history of serial entertainment, perhaps it should have been.

In the following, I compare Serial to serialized true crime in the nineteenth century in order to demonstrate the capacities of serialized narrative to produce an invested and even obsessed audience who plays between fact, speculation, fictionality, and fictionalization. The boundaries between fiction and nonfiction are not absolute, as I will show through how the Elstree murder case of 1823 promiscuously passed between the newspapers, the stage, and the tourist trap. Serial unleashes the positive and negative ethical potentialities of serial form. Inspiring a dedicated fandom, Serial links episodes to each other through the curiosity of speculation. When the pod-cast’s fans continue that speculation beyond idle chatter online and desire to continue the story by investigating it themselves, then the ethical ramifications of seriality are amplified for the podcast. While Serial has the potential to help exonerate a man, the enthusiastic fandom also risks treating the nonfictional as if it were fictional by relating to real people as if they were characters.

History of Serial Form

The media culture that emerged in the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century saw the proliferation of print entertainment in a variety of forms. Newspapers, periodicals, broadsides, novels in parts, and novels in volume—all of these forms became easier to produce, cheaper, and thus more accessible to a growing population of print consumers throughout the nineteenth century. The century consequently saw the rise of mass entertainment. The masses consumed entertainment voraciously, and the boundaries between news and fiction were porous. Within this context, serial reading unfolded as a practice that fundamentally affected the reception of real and fictional events.

The logic of seriality perpetuates the idea that there is always more to discover, and this impression carries across both nonfictional and fictional uses of serialization. Indeed, the contrast between factual news and fictional entertainment is not so clear-cut. Mark W. Turner explains that the “natural state of being for periodicals is change and movement, and newspapers and periodicals rely, to a greater or lesser degree, on the ‘new’ and on the very modern concept of advancement, of moving forward, of futurity” (184). News signals change and enforce the sense that audiences must inform themselves regularly in order to stay up to date. News, premised on novelty, is topical, relevant—therefore, definitions of what constitutes news vary widely by publication and intended audience (“News”). While news items like speeches in parliament, natural disasters, or the current price of corn may seem straightforwardly factual, the reporting of sensational murders blurred the line between fact, speculation, and fabrication in ways that reveals the interdependence of journalistic serial narratives and fictional serial narratives.

Scholars of serial narrative have long recognized that serial reading produces a number of specific effects. While William Warner posits that a “pleasure-seeking ethos” is “endemic to serial entertainments” (64), other scholars have suggested that serialization preys upon anxiety in order to drive further consumption. According to Wolfgang Iser, enforced temporal delay leads to deeper imaginative engagement (qtd. in Allen 39). This deeper imaginative engagement allows readers to spend more time speculating and imagining the unresolved story. Rob Allen further suggests that the success of an installment of a serialized narrative is “measured not by readerly satisfaction but readerly desire. The satisfied reader is not sufficient; it is the reader who is insatiable for more that the serial requires” (40). Sean O’Sullivan also finds that satisfaction is “antithetical to the structure and attractions of seriality as a practice,” as serial narratives tend to operate against containment. In fact, Serial’s fans confirm the effect of anxiety and desire when they write of their distress in reaction to Episode 6. Redditor ctznmatt writes, “I’m even more confused and distressed than I was last week. And it’s not even Thursday yet for me” (Episode 6 Discussion).¹ Redditor gordanshumway2 agrees: “Distressed is the perfect word” (“Episode 6 Discussion”).

Serialization, then, unleashes the considerable power of a desiring, anxious, and invested audience in stories that continually defer closure. This combination is particularly volatile when united with the serial narration of true crime, as the nineteenth century taught us. Victorians routinely sought more of horrific crime stories. They read about murders in newspapers and broadsides, they bought serialized novelizations of the crime, and they attended dramatizations. More than this, what historian Judith Flanders has called “murder sight-seeing” was a common pastime (3). Victorians traipsed through crime scenes to look at the dead bodies and steal keep-sakes from the scene; they eagerly attended hangings and visited funerals. In 1827, Thomas de Quincey described nineteenth-century audiences: “The world in general … are very bloody-minded; and all they want in a murder is a copious effusion of blood” (qtd. in Flanders 19).

The genre of true crime, in the nineteenth century and today, centrally concerns questions of contested guilt, typically in the context of a legal case. Thus, true-crime narratives cultivate audience speculation. This speculation reconfigures the past as participants interrogate degrees of probability regarding the evidence of the case. This interrogation of historical possibilities powerfully resembles participation in fictional worlds in that both depend upon imaginative invention in relation to a constellation of foregoing evidence.² The most salient difference is that, while wholly fictional narratives remain fully in the realm of the imaginary, legal interrogation of the past potentially impinges upon the actual world. Legal decisions about what probably happened in the past, regardless of whether it actually happened, have real-world, material consequences for real-world people. True-crime narratives, then, draw upon a common resource with fiction—speculation—but they do so with very different consequences, as true-crime narratives intend to be received as nonfictional. Indeed, it is not always clear that audiences assiduously differentiate between the real and the imaginary—either in the nineteenth century or in the twenty-first.

The nineteenth century powerfully demonstrates that the speculation endemic to true crime does not stay strictly isolated to the rational consideration of evidence; instead, speculation runs over into fictionalized re-tellings and re-imaginings of the crime. The 1823 case of John Thurtell exemplifies traits of serially narrated true crimes in the period: the murder case was the first to have been “tried by newspaper”; Thurtell’s crimes were said to have founded newspaper fortunes, and cultural memory of the case would persist into the 1840s (Flanders 20). Fictionalizations like those that derived from Thurtell’s case show that, even when the story is true, audiences relate to infamous criminals as characters.

The Elstree Murder

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, John Thurtell had failed as a cloth merchant and lost most of his money gambling (Flanders 22). He defrauded his creditors when he claimed to have been robbed of the money he owed them (Flanders 23). So, Thurtell—deep in debt—encountered William Weare, a notorious and successful gambler who was said to have carried all his savings on his person, rumored to amount to £2,000.

The evidence against Thurtell was fairly clear, and popular opinion during the trial was that he had murdered William Weare. Thurtell conspired with his friends Joseph Hunt and William Probert. On October 24, 1823, Thurtell invited Weare to go hunting in Hertfordshire at Probert’s cottage. On the way, Thurtell stopped and shot at Weare; as Thurtell later confessed to his accomplices, the gun misfired, and Thurtell bludgeoned Weare to death with his pistol and then slit his throat (Flanders 25). Thurtell, Hunt, and Probert first buried the body near Probert’s cottage but then moved it to a pond farther away.

For any given day during the month after Weare’s murder, the four pages of The Times consisted of two pages of advertisements, two columns of news, and the rest given over to police, trial, and magistrates’ court reports concerning the case (Flanders 27). Newspapers did not feign neutrality. The Morning Chronicle called the three men “murderers” before their conviction, and several newspapers printed libelous reports of other supposed murders, rapes, and heinous deeds attributed to Thurtell, Probert, and Hunt. For those who could not afford newspapers, broadsides provided updates on trial reports and included songs and poetic effusions on the subject of the murder, along with illustrations.

Two weeks before the trial was scheduled, fictionalized plays based on the murder were advertised at the Surrey and the Coburg (Flanders 30). A playbill for one of the plays touts sets that are “illustrated by CORRECT VIEWS taken on the SPOT” and that have “THE IDENTICAL HORSE AND GIG Alluded to by the Daily Press” (Flanders 33–34, emphasis original). This fetishization of the “real” objects of the murder in the play shows how the audience’s fascination with what factually happened becomes entangled in fictionalizations that promise to bring the audience experientially closer to the captivating case.

Indeed, Probert’s cottage itself became a site of murder tourism where visitors would pay an entrance fee for a tour, which would conclude with purchasing souvenirs—a lucky few were able to buy a bit of the sack in which Weare’s body was carried, and others could buy a Staffordshire pottery figure or a book complete with a map of Weare’s posthumous journeys (Flanders 35). As late as 1828, Walter Scott wrote that he and his friends paid a woman to give them a tour of the cottage (Flanders 35). Flanders claims that “everything to do with Thurtell had a commercial value” (43).

After Thurtell’s conviction, his character as “the drinker of blood” began to disappear in public discourse to be replaced by Thurtell the gallant gentleman (Flanders 40). Such a change reveals how Thurtell was subject to the projected speculations of an audience who knew him only by reputation. It was said that forty thousand people attended Thurtell’s execution. One broadside reported that, as Thurtell stood under the scaffold, he looked to the crowd and made a slight bow. In response, every head in the crowd was uncovered, and many murmured “what a gentleman” (Flanders 40). After Thurtell’s execution, Willi...