(Spoiler alert: Many spoilers for the Serial podcast ahead.)
One of the most fascinating things about radio is how it forces your imagination to engage. You have to picture the stories in your mind, along with the places reporters are talking about and the people they are interviewing. You have to imagine the leaves you can hear rustling in the wind, and the desk you can hear someone sorting papers on.
But sometimes your imagination is tired. It’s been a long year, and now the most engrossing podcast of the year has just come to an end and you’re kind of over dreaming up the scenes. You just want to know exactly what everything in the story looks like.
Of course, we’re talking about Serial, the biggest audio-reporting phenomenon of our time, which wrapped yesterday. (If you haven’t listened to Serial yet, you should. If for no other reason than the rest of this piece won’t make much sense until you do.) Not only was it fascinating, it painted a picture unlike any other.
More than nearly all podcasts before it, the tension in Serial was high. The question at its heart asked: Was an innocent man (Adnan Syed) sent to prison for murdering his ex-girlfriend (Hae Min Lee)? Is an innocent man’s life being stolen from him every minute you’re listening to this story? And picturing him stuck in a cell might have been the most nerve-wracking thing a podcast ever made its audience do. Yet, as the weeks went on, listeners knew there would be no real satisfactory resolution.
And there wasn’t. But now that you’re not waiting for the conclusion, you can Google image search all the things about the show you were curious about but didn’t dare look up for fear of being spoiled on Serials‘s outcome. And actually, you don’t even have to, we did it for you.
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