This Time On, 'Serial'

The building of a podcast empire (and a very-high-stakes second season).

- Carl Swanson

IT WAS THE DAY AFTER THE FIRST episode of the second season of the Serial podcast finally kerplunked into view—along with its subject, a soldier named Bowe Bergdahl, who in 2009 walked off his post in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban and held for five years and is now awaiting court-martial for desertion—and the show’s host, Sarah Koenig, who doesn’t sound quite like her deliberately paced radio self in person, was a little unnerved by all the attention. ¶ “I mean, obviously this is going to die down,” she said. “But I was talking to some of my sources who were like: ‘I was interviewed by CNN about this today!’ And I’m like, What-what-what, whoa! But then I realized that this is a national story. I have to suck it up.” She laughs, with explosive self-consciousness. “I can’t complain about it. That’s ridiculous. ¶ I feel like I want to say, ‘Nobody read ahead!’ ” Here she drops into a patiently-explaining-teacher cadence: “Everyone wait for us to be done. That’s my dream world: ‘Nobody read anything, just listen to what we do and make your measured, calm judgments.’ But that’s not the world we live in, obviously.” And then, in a squeaky whisper: “Can’t we just wait? I’ll get there, I’ll get there …”

Last year, Serial was an experiment, to see if people would do something a bit old-fashioned: tune-in-next-week-to-find-out-what-we-learned. It came from the producers of the public-radio program This American Life, who had themselves been early to podcasting (which makes sense, since it’s more or less radio-to-go). But from the start,