Why Has Serial Abandoned the Best Thing About Serial ?

Without a doubt, the new season of Serial, the podcast’s fourth, addresses a worthy topic: what went on at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba following the Sept. 11 attacks. After an introductory episode full of sardonic details—the gift shop selling “It doesn’t Gitmo better than this” coffee mugs, former low-level personnel saying things like “I partied my ass off at Gitmo”—co-host Sarah Koenig settles in to tell two far more serious stories in Episodes 2 and 3. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a podcast about Guantánamo—yet not at all what you might hope to get from the podcast that made podcasts famous with its juggernaut first season in 2014.

This season’s sober second episode recounts the ordeal of a detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is interviewed along with “Mr. X,” as the interrogator charged with extracting information from him insists on being called. The third relates the tribulations of Ahmad Al-Halabi, a U.S. airman and Guantánamo translator who in 2004 faced court martial on 30 trumped-up charges related to the mishandling of classified documents and alleged espionage. All but four of the charges were ultimately dropped; Al-Halabi pleaded guilty to only minor transgressions and was released the following year. Unsurprisingly, an Army Reserve intelligence officer who was distrustful of the camp’s Muslim servicemen turned out to be the instigator of this and other unfounded investigations.

These stories are important, but they’ve been told extensively before. Slahi’s Guantánamo diaries were excerpted in Slate in 2013, published as a book that became an international bestseller in 2015, and adapted as a dramatic film, The Mauritanian, in 2021. The failed espionage case against Al-Halabi and other Muslim servicemen at Guantánamo was extensively reported by the Seattle Times, among other outlets, and is the subject of a lengthy feature in the New York Times Magazine—confoundingly, a corporate sibling to Serial—that published just this week, by a writer who first reported on the story 20 years ago. While there’s nothing wrong with using a different form to tell a well-known story—particularly one with which some younger listeners may be unfamiliar—this season’s Serial nevertheless feels like a bait and switch. Whatever its merits as a subject, what exactly makes Guantánamo Serial material?

There’s a clue to what makes Serial work best right there in the title. Serial promises a serialized narrative, one that will make listeners eager to find out how an investigation unfolds—what happens next. But clearly Koenig and her co-host, Dana Chivvis, don’t find this format obligatory. Season 4 of Serial, at least so far, appears to comprise a collection of audio feature stories about Guantánamo told from the perspectives of people who found themselves there for a variety of reasons, with little to connect them besides the shared location. If there’s a single mystery or storyline to this, it has yet to emerge, and we’re a third of the way into the season.

If Koenig and Chivvis want to do serious reporting on issues like human rights violations committed under the authority of the U.S. government, they should, of course, go right ahead! But do they have to get our hopes up by calling it Serial? Why not make it a stand-alone series and call it something earnest and a bit dull, like Guantánamo Portraits? Then at least we’d know what we were getting into and could allot our listening time accordingly.

It’s strange that Serial—the podcast that proved to millions of listeners just how beautifully the new medium is suited to the addictive serialized format—seems so uninterested in pursuing it. This week’s episode ends with a brief teaser about how even weirder things happened to Al-Halabi after his release, but you can tell that Koenig’s heart isn’t really in it. That’s a shame, because serialized storytelling has the power to captivate listeners who might not otherwise be drawn to the subject matter Serial wants to tackle, catching them up in its narrative momentum. The countless podcasts that have followed in the wake of Serial’s initial success recognize this. If only Serial recognized it too.