Hot take: murderers are boring
Did Ira Glass pull a fast one on us?
Est. Read Time: 7 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
New to the SternJourn? Check out the best of 2022, 2021, or 2020.
Hello, Sternal Journalists!
Earlier this week, as I was falling asleep, I cued up the newest This American Life to let the nasally dulcets of Ira Glass drift me off to neverneverland. At the top of the episode, In Dog We Trust, Ira gave a plug for the newest podcast from Serial Productions, the podcast production company that was started under This American Life as the show Serial, then spun off as a production company of its own, which was then bought by the New York Times.
It’s a bit of a long plug, but I’ve thought about the plug even more than the show it’s plugging (which I binged), so if you’re into it, give it a read and then let me vent. Here’s Ira:
Our coworkers over at Serial have a new podcast, and what they’re doing is they’re going back to what they did in their very first season with Adnan Syed’s story. They’re looking into a murder. This time, the reporter is Kim Barker. And she looks into this case that she’s known about since she was a teenager in Laramie, Wyoming. And what’s remarkable about this series—what really feels like nothing else Serial has done, or really I think anybody has done, is you just get to hear Kim, who is this Pulitzer-prize winning reporter, just methodically—going from person to person to person, source to source—first you know just to figure out if this is a story, if there’s a chance she’s gonna find something of interest; and then to piece together bit by bit what really happened. And you just hear her work these interviews one after another with this—I dunno—directness and clear-headedness, that’s really something to hear. And she ends up at this place she did not expect. I remember Julie Snyder, who runs Serial, and who ran This American Life with me for years and years, told me that when she listened early on to just this long, long, very rough cut of the interviews—no narration, no music, no nothing. She was like, “If we can make a series that sounds like that listening experience, it’ll be a new feeling for a podcast to have.” Anyway, the show is called Coldest Case in Laramie from Serial and the New York Times. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay! If you’re still here, congratulations and thank you for being a real one. A real what exactly, I’m not sure. Information addict? Literary narcissist? Person avoiding the responsibilities of the start of the week? I genuinely don’t know.
But let me get straight to it: I think Ira Glass pulled a fuckin’ fast one with this plug and I think he knows it. Because what he promises is that (a) Coldest Case takes Serial back to the Adnan Syed days and (b) it does something “like nothing else Serial has done… or anybody has done.”
I listened to all of it in two days so this is not a knock against it per se, but after finishing, I was left with the feeling that they had definitely achieved promise A but gotten nowhere near promise B. I’ll avoid spoilers, but in my listen, it really felt like everything that made Coldest Case great is everything that made the original season of Serial great. But I mean that pretty literally. Everything. It’s kind of the same podcast.
And that’s okay! I just wish Ira had said,
Listen, y’all. Serial’s done a bunch over the years. They had the first hit. That was ALLL This American Life and you KNOW it. Then we did the Bowe Bergdahl season that was aah-aah, you all lost faith. We did a season on policing that wasn’t even really serialized, and then they left TAL and did some critically acclaimed stuff that only story-whores talk about like S-Town and The Trojan Horse Affair, but now we’re back to just the normal-ass, basic-as-fuck there was a murder a long time ago and a good reporter is going to get way too fucking close to the case. It will be uncomfortable and delicious and the thing you know we rock at. Make Serial famous again. Take us back to 2014 PLEEEEEASE.
Because there’s nothing wrong with that. Listen, Serial was the first truly famous podcast. It was almost a decade ago and I remember it because real JMS fans will know I was actively making my first great work of art, the 100+ episode podcast, Word With Friend. This sounds like a joke now, but I swear to god people were legit texting me like “Julian, podcasts are about to take off and you’re going with em. This is it. It’s happening.”
It was an incredible time. It was like when Gunsmoke was the only television show anyone had heard of, so everyone watched it. And everyone could talk about it. But it was gooood too! It was like if the first television show ever was Succession. Nobody was fucking doing anything for those 12 weeks except “You think he did it? I did think he did it, but then I thought about it more and now I don’t think he did it.”
Tiktok didn’t exist. Instagram didn’t have Stories. It was the good old days, people had to talk to each other. And people were talking to each other about Serial. It makes sense that they want to go back to those good old days, but don’t pretend it’s something different than it is.
Because in the 8+ years since Serial Season One, the True Crime genre has not stopped. People make podcasts that are essentially just two-hour quip-athons as they read Wikipedia articles of various murders. And they get very popular. That’s all because of Serial! And we know now the ethical queasiness of exploiting a murder victims story for clout and listenership. Societally, we are much better versed in that than we were in 2014.
But of course, everyone is allowed to chase clout and listens; just be upfront about it. I liked the podcast! It was another This American Life-style slam-dunk. But that’s not because it was a story about a murder, it’s because it was a story told by people who can tell any story well. So why use those talents on murder?
Murder, on the whole, is generally committed by people with terrible intentions. And people with terrible intentions are actually boring. They’re jealous, they’re petty, they’re narcissistic, they’re angry. Blablabla, we get it. We don’t need to glorify their shitty, destructive acts by making prestige media about them.
And I know it’s ironic for me to say “why did this media need to be made?” in my absolutely unnecessary weekly vanity project. But I believe strongly in everyone’s right and duty to occasionally stand in the middle of the town square and say, “Hey! HEY! Look at this! Am I crazy or is this fucked up?”1
So hey! Hey! Am I crazy or is it fucked up that Serial made both podcasts and true crime cool, then left what I’m calling a “murder vacuum” in the podcast world so that many far lesser podcasters and writers filled it with faster, cheaper, and far more prolific murder stories, making it one of the dominant genres and cultural forces across all mediums, and then eventually they turned around and said “Holy shit, this is still popular. Let’s cash back in and do the exact same thing, but we’re gonna sell it so people feel smart for listening and not like they’re just listening to another murder podcast?” Isn’t it? Kinda fucked up?
Anyway!
Recommendations
All Quiet on the Western Front. Movie. I watched the original in Mr. Eppeldauer’s 7th grade Social Studies class. I don’t remember the music in the original being so badass.
“Just the Way You Are” Music Video. Music Video. I was thinking of calling Ira Glass a “nasal Barry White” and wanted to see if that made any sense, so I googled Barry White and found this incredible, simple music video.
Story of the Week with Joel Stein. Podcast. Self-described “celebrity journalist” Joel Stein talks to “real journalists” about viral stories they’ve written. For better or for worse, I feel like I’ve been very influenced by Joel Stein and something about this podcast is very comforting. Also, please read the “Assessments” portion of his Wikipedia page.
Shameless Acquisition Target (podcast) + Vengeance (film). I’ve recommended these both before, but if my above rant spoke to you at all, I highly recommend them as non-fictional and fictional explorations of whether the whole prestige audio thing and it’s dedication to supremacy of storytelling above all else have gotten too powerful.
By the way, this is what Instagram podcast promotion looked like in 2016. Why the hell did I have to be so ahead of the curve?
P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.
There is a secondary and far more important duty to, if told by a commanding majority of diverse points of view, that you are in fact crazy, to then shut the hell up about it.
BIG fan of this edition, Jules, and not just because you've suggested two incredible band names:
"nasally dulcets"
"murder vacuum”
Also thanks for last week's "Women Talking" rec -- really glad I watched it.