Tell Better Stories

• Author: Doug Jasinski
• Date: January 27, 2015

Podcasting has become something of a recurring joke around my office this year.

One of my colleagues has recently become intrigued by the medium, and is eager to find suitable client or in-house projects where our agency can work in this arena. I’ve been helpfully proposing that every project we discuss is a nail for which this newfangled podcasting hammer would be the perfect tool and teasing her about the cutting edge nature of this technology, which has had native support within iTunes since 2005, and is really but a short technological hop from old-fashioned radio serials that have been extant for almost a century.

Hot on the heels of my genial mockery (fret not for my colleague, I get as good as I give) I quickly found myself hoist with my own petard when I noticed the nespresso-machine buzz in our small studio was increasingly focused on a new legally themed podcast called SERIAL. Upon giving it a try, I too quickly became hooked (to the podcast, I’ve been a caffeine addict for decades already).

For the uninitiated, SERIAL is podcasting’s breakout hit, debuting at #1 on iTunes and garnering more downloads than any other podcast in history (over 20 million and counting as of Dec. 2014). The series was explicitly designed by the show’s creators to be the audio equivalent of a great HBO or Netflix series – “like House of Cards or Game of Thrones but you can enjoy it while you’re driving”. SERIAL is a 12-episode non-fiction investigative reporting series that explores a 15-year old teenage murder case in Baltimore, and questions whether or not the jilted boyfriend convicted in the case and now serving a life sentence was in fact wrongfully convicted. Essentially the show asks listeners to step into the role of armchair jurors, while the show’s narrator carefully unspools the evidence in seesaw fashion that will have you switching camps between “he did it” and “he didn’t do it” constantly throughout the duration of the series.

As I binge-listened to the show over a period of two weeks or so I pondered what exactly it was that made the program so compelling. After all, at the heart of the series is a legal case that, despite the gravity of the crime involved, looks harrowingly “normal” in its details. A 15-year old murder case, in which the teenage victim’s body was quickly located, the recently spurned pot-smoking boyfriend was questioned and promptly arrested and then convicted. It is the kind of case many seasoned criminal defence lawyers have...