Second Take: ‘Serial’ captivates viewers with engaging storytelling, inconclusive end

“Come on, either you think I did it or you don’t … People come expecting a monster, and when they don’t find that, they come expecting a victim … And the reality of it is, I’m just a normal person.”

These are the words of Adnan Syed in the penultimate episode of “Serial,” the highly engrossing podcast series that excavates a first-degree murder case from 1999. At this point, Syed has spent about 15 years of his life sentence in prison for a crime which, he earnestly claims, he did not commit.

This is what it all comes down to, right? Was 17-year-old Syed guilty of the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee? This question among many are explored over the course of the 12-episode season. In listening to host and executive producer Sarah Koenig and her exploration of the events as they are cast before her, I was driven toward many contentious thoughts, among them being that perhaps, this simply isn’t the right question.

Though the intimacy with which Koenig reports evokes a character of sincerity, I often found myself reacting to her navigation of a very fine line: that is, the line between personal and impersonal, humanizing and perhaps a little bit unprofessional. I asked myself, are we all listening to this to alleviate the question of innocence and guilt? Or, is it really to reconcile other big questions that arise: why it happened, how so much can still be so inexplicable, for whom we should feel the very worst?

Nevertheless, the questions we latch onto arouse us to unordinary action. We tune in to the story’s peculiar magnetism, indeed active and even voyeuristic as listeners; we’re thrust into an array of police interrogations, prison phone calls, and highly anticipated interviews. And inevitably, some of us become fans, compelled to digest one episode after the next, after the next.

Why is “Serial” so addicting? On a subconscious level, Koenig convinced me that I would discover “the truth,” which she even confesses to be highly elusive, only left to speculation on a week-by-week basis. She captivated my attraction to good storytelling, but also trapped me in the localized events of a real, albeit mostly past, world – her own thoughtfulness urged me to assess an event that had never truly happened to me. It felt as if I had witnessed almost everything, and yet I closed each podcast window convinced that every puzzle piece still remained entirely tentative.

Amidst all the indecipherable details of this murder, I also grew to care greatly about the story that lied in all things but the murder itself; that is, not simply whether Syed or Jay Wilds or anyone murdered Lee, but also, the more realistic, more permanent complexities of life surrounding it.

In a recent interview with “The Intercept,” Wilds said, “I feel like (Koenig) created an evil archetype of me and sensationalized my motives. It helped fan the flames of this story that people had already moved on from.”

While I know some people who perceive Koenig’s emotional relationship with her subjects as a weakness, I see it as the thread that holds the whole thing together. That doesn’t of course negate how she has consequently affected people – her listeners, but also Wilds and his family, Syed’s family and Lee’s family. It’s difficult to say whether this podcast would have been so enthralling if not for the ways in which she, intentionally or not, characterizes her subjects.

Koenig is emotional. She often says that she likes Syed, that she feels bad, uneasy, confused. Syed is not necessarily a criminal to her. Like all people in the story of “Serial,” he is complicated, interesting and fallible. But if an emotional reporting style was the goal, there are some personal things I’d like to have better understood: How did Syed really feel about Wilds? Why don’t we hear his explanation behind Wilds’ story? Also, why is Syed’s lawyer largely portrayed as someone who just messed up? Could this have been avoided if Koenig better addressed other institutional problems that might have hindered a full investigation of the case?

I was attracted to “Serial” because Koenig engaged me in a profound caring for those affected by the murder. The podcast is totally a matter of perspective – I am dependent on Koenig’s dictation of the events – and yet I feel she has endowed me with all rights to interpretation.

It’s easy to forget, it seems, that we are often eventually gratified in the realm of entertainment and storytelling. But more often, I think, we are not. “Serial” and its many frustrations could not be more reflective of the fact that it’s non-fiction; we distress over the gaps and the missing interviews, the unpardonable deceptions, the sense that we didn’t figure it out in the end. But is that not exactly how we should expect it to be – how all things inherently are among people and the trials within our lives?

Perhaps we leave “Serial” wishing for more, and perhaps we have our gripes over Koenig’s decisions in her reporting. I feel, if we’re going to talk about “Serial” in a way that’s as real as the story it tells, we have no choice but to accept its ambiguity. It is the only way to move on – that is, until the second season, of course.