Serial

About

Serial is an episodic non-fiction crime drama podcast created as a spin-off of the public radio program This American Life. This first season of the show explores a mysterious murder that occurred in Baltimore, Maryland in 1999.

History

According to an interview with Mother Jones,^[1]Serial creators Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder came up with the idea for the show while working together as producers on This American Life. On October 3rd, 2014, the first episode of Serial was released, which was followed by additional episodes released weekly on the Serial Podcast website.^[4] The first season investigates the 1999 murder of Baltimore resident Hae Min Lee and the possible wrongful conviction of her boyfriend Adnan Syed.

Online Presence

On January 28th, 2014, a Facebook^[3] page titled “Serial Podcast” was created, gathering upwards of 46,900 likes in the next 10 months. On July 2nd, the @serial Twitter^[8] feed was launched, garnering more than 44,500 followers in five months. On October 5th, the /r/serialpodcast^[2] subreddit was created for discussions about the podcast, which gained over 10,800 subscribers in the next six weeks. On November 14th, the entertainment news blog A.V. Club^[9] announced the launch of their new podcast about Serial titled “The Serial Serial.”

Parodies

On November 3rd, 2014, YouTuber Paul Laudiero uploaded a parody of Serial in which Koenig interviews a Best Buy employee (shown below). Over the next two weeks, Laudiero uploaded four additional Serial parodies.

MailChimp Ad

Each Serial episode begins with a advertisement for the email marketing service provider MailChimp, in which a young girl can be heard struggling to pronounce the company’s name (shown below).

Fans of the show began referencing MailChimp as an in-joke on Twitter, often mocking the young girl’s pronunciation as “MailKimp.”^[6] On November 12th, 2014, the tech news blog Mashable^[7] published an article about the “‘MailKimp’ meme.”