Team, the wait is over. The new season of Serial has arrived and the first episode dropped at 11am today.
Last year the case of murdered high school student Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed, the man convicted of the murder in 1999, was the focus and it had more than 75million of us hooked. How crazy is that? The case continues via the Undisclosed podcast and recently, new evidence has come to light which has cast further doubt on his conviction.
This season's *Serial will focus on *the case of Sergeant Bow Bergdahl, the US soldier who disappeared from his base in 2009, and was captured by the Taliban and kept hostage for five years. In 2014, he was freed when the US government agreed a 'swap' of five Guantánamo Bay prisoners in exchange for his return.
The case of Bergdahl is an interesting and perplexing one because of the mysterious circumstances surrounding his disappearance, although he has maintained that he left the safety of his base to report misconduct in his unit to a general officer. What we do know is that Bergdahl was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the US military, because of a series of emails he wrote to his parents. In March of this year he was charged with desertion and misbehaviour before the enemy, a crime punishable by a life sentence, although the trial is yet to take place.
Sarah Koenig will be leading the podcast once again, with Mark Boal, the screenwriter of Zero Dark Thirty (the film all about the black ops mission to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden), said to be a narrator on the show. Boal is aapparently working on a film adaptaion of Bergdahl's story and has been helping Serial with information on the case. Both of them, along with 'at least one of the show's producers', according to New York Magazine, attended a preliminary court hearing in September which was to determine whether he would be court-martialled.
What's interesting about their choice of case is that it's current and they'll be following the case as it unravels rather than as a reflection, like in season one. As well as that, this is an very high profile case, which surely makes their work potentially even more groundbreaking and/or problematic. It'll be extremely interesting to find out how they've decided to structure the show, that's for sure.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.