Serial
Serial is a podcast from the producers of This American Life, hosted by Sarah Koenig. This podcast tells one true story over the course of a season.
Each season, they pursue a plot and its characters wherever they take us. We won’t know what happens at the end until we get there, not long before we get there with them. Each week they bring us the next instalment in the story, so it’s important to listen to the episodes in order.
In Season 1, it was about a high school senior named Hae Min Lee who disappeared one day after school in 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland. A month later, her body was found in a city park. She’d been strangled.
Her 17 year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was sentenced to life in prison. The case against him was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who corroborated that he helped Adnan bury Hae’s body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.
Sarah Koenig assembled through thousands of documents, listened to trial testaments and police probings, and spoke to everyone she could find who recalled what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee. She uncovered that the trial covered up a far more complex story than the jury or the public ever got to hear. The high school scene, the shifting statements to police, the prejudices, the incomplete defences, the minimal forensic proof.
In Season One of Serial, Sarah Koenig looks for answers.
In Season Two, during the month of May 2014, a U.S. Special Operations team in a Black Hawk helicopter landed in the hills of Afghanistan.
Waiting for them were more than a dozen Taliban fighters and a tall American, who looked pale and out of sorts: Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier, had been an inmate of the Taliban for roughly five years, and now he was going home.
President Obama broadcasted Bergdahl’s return in the Rose Garden, with the soldier’s parents at his side. Bergdahl’s hometown prepared a big celebration to welcome him back. But then, within days of his rescue, public reaction to his return flipped. People started saying Bergdahl shouldn’t be celebrated. Some of the soldiers from his unit called him an impostor. They said he had consciously walked off their small station in eastern Afghanistan and into dangerous terrain.
His hometown canceled its celebration and the army begun an inspection.
Finally, in March, the military taxed Bergdahl with two crimes, one of which bears the likelihood of a life sentence.
Now, in Season Two, we got to hear what he had to say.
For this season, Sarah Koenig teamed up with filmmaker Mark Boal and Page 1 to find out why one distictive guy decided to walk away, into Afghanistan.
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