Serial is coming back in March to tackle Guantanamo Bay
Six years after the last season of Serial, Sarah Koenig's Peabody-winning podcast is coming back to take on the "human-scale history of Guantanamo"
It’s to the enduring credit of Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and the entire team at award-winning, genre-codifying podcast Serial that they’ve never really dipped their toes back into the true-crime podcasting ocean that the first season of their show helped define. Instead of picking another lurid, unsolved murder to deep-dive on in the wake of the massive interest in the death of Hae Min Lee, the show’s second and third seasons both aimed at crime from different directions—the case of U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, in the case of the show’s 2015 installment, and a year in the life of a standard U.S. courtroom in 2018. Now, Koenig and her team (now owned by The New York Times, via Serial Productions) are preparing to return, announcing today that Serial’s fourth season will arrive on March 28, and will focus on the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Koenig, Snyder, and Dana Chivvis announced the news at Brooklyn’s On Air Fest on Friday afternoon, during a panel celebrating 10 years of the Peabody-winning podcast. Hosted by Koenig and Chivvis, the new season will air its first two episodes on the 28th, before switching to a weekly release schedule as the pair “tell the history of Guantanamo through the personal stories of those on the ground.”
Koenig noted that she and her fellow writers and producers have been trying to do a series on Guantanamo for almost the entire life span of Serial, saying that,
Dana and I tried for years to figure out how to make a story that captures what it’s really like there for the people caught inside this massive, flawed experiment – not just the prisoners, but also the staff who built it and ran it. For so long, all the best stories we heard were off the record. But now people are ready to talk.