It was one of the biggest and most unlikely media successes of 2014 – the story of an almost forgotten killing, told in podcast episodes that gained such huge popularity they were downloaded more than 100m times worldwide.
On Thursday, the producers of Serial released the first episode of their second series, sparking such a frenzied rush to download the podcast that it briefly caused their website to collapse.
While the programme’s first series explored a previously obscure murder case, the subject matter of Serial’s second season is much higher profile. The podcast’s producer Sarah Koenig and others will explore the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the US army sergeant who was held captive by the Taliban for almost five years after he disappeared from his post in Afghanistan in disputed circumstances in 2009.
The first episode of the new series begins with the soldier’s rescue by US special forces in June last year, as part of a prisoner swap with the Taliban.
Bergdahl is a highly controversial figure in his home country, where he has been accused by some of treason. The 29-year-old was charged with desertion and misbehaviour and could face life imprisonment if convicted by a military court.
The podcast, which includes lengthy extracts from taped conversations between Bergdahl and the filmmaker Mark Boal, is the first time the soldier has spoken publicly of his experiences. He gave Boal – the Oscar-winning writer and producer of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty – permission to share his work with Koenig for the podcast.
Asked to explain why he had walked away from his position at a remote US army outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Bergdahl tells Boal he did it to attract attention to what he alleged were leadership failings in his unit and become a heroic figure.
“Doing what I did was my way of saying: ‘I am Jason Bourne,’” the soldier says. “I had this fantastic idea that I was going to prove to the world that I was the real thing, I could be what it is that all those guys out there who go to the movies ... they all want to be that, but I wanted to prove that I was that.”
As Koenig, who narrates the story, remarks: “Any one piece of this story could keep a person’s mind churning.”
In an introductory blog to coincide with the new episode, she writes: “This story – it spins out in so many unexpected directions. Because, yes, it’s about Bowe Bergdahl and about one strange decision he made, to leave his post. (And Bergdahl, by the way, is such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve encountered before.)
“But it’s also about all of the people affected by that decision, and the choices they made. Unlike our story in season one, this one extends far out into the world. It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantánamo policy.”
Serial was launched in October 2014 as a spin-off of NPR’s This American Life, but the intriguing story of Adnan Syed – the Baltimore high school student convicted of killing his girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999, but who continues to protest his innocence – rapidly won Koenig and her fellow producers a huge global audience far beyond that of its parent programme.
Its runaway success sparked a renewed interest in the podcast format, and in new ways of telling non-fiction stories, often investigated over many months.
It also contributed to what may prove a breakthrough in Syed’s case, when a Maryland judge ordered last month that it should be reopened to consider witness testimony and evidence that was left out of his original trial in 1999.
