Julie Snyder and Sarah Koenig (Elise Bergerson)
Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of your favorite podcasts? You can find out Thursday night when Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder bring their touring live show, “Backstage with the Creators of Serial” to the Strathmore. The live program promises to give fans of the show some insight into how its creators put these engaging stories together and how they choose what to include (or not).
Serial was a smash hit with its first season, a true crime story about a 1999 high school murder in Baltimore. The series became the first podcast to win a Peabody Award—not to mention earning its own SNL parody.
The podcast wrapped up its second season last year following the unusual case of accused army deserter and long-time Taliban war prisoner Bowe Bergdahl. While a third season is currently in the works, co-creators Koenig and Snyder took a slight detour to help with the latest must-listen podcast, S-Town, which was downloaded 10 million times in four days when it came out in late March.
Snyder describes the live show as dealing a lot with of “what we intended to do and what ended up happening.” She’s specifically referring to the hullabaloo on the Internet (especially Reddit), the conspiracy theories, and the self-appointed amateur detectives that went crazy trying to figure out whether or not Adnan Syed was guilty of the murder of his high-school girlfriend.
“The success of Serial was a real shock to us,” Snyder says. “We needed audience engagement, but on the flip side, we felt like we were losing control of the story. That’s partly why we put out S-Town all at once. I wouldn’t ever want to go through what the first season was again.”
While the first season of Serial was an immediate sensation, the second season about Bowe Bergdahl lacked the same pizazz, largely due to the fact that Koenig and Snyder were unable to get an interview with the disgraced soldier and relied heavily on second-hand information. Snyder, however, would argue otherwise.
“We saw a lot of media myopia between seasons,” she says. “The second season was popular, especially among people engaged with the military. When we’re in towns with military bases, they all want to talk about the second season. It was also popular among people interested in foreign policy.”
Plus, unlike the first season, it wasn’t a murder mystery. “But in the first season, we weren’t actually going for a murder mystery,” Snyder adds. “We wanted to address wrongful conviction and the criminal justice system.”
Regardless of how you felt about Serial’s second season (or the at-times extremely intrusive S-Town, for that matter), it’s clear that Koenig and Snyder have revolutionized podcasting, blending journalism and entertainment and bringing it to the masses.
“Journalism should be entertaining, especially if you’re doing an 11-hour story,” Snyder says, adding that they try to find what’s most surprising about a story and structure the whole thing around such pivotal moments, creating those juicy cliffhangers in the process.
But they also have to be careful about how they portray people. “Journalists should always ask themselves: Are we being exploitative? Are we telling the truth?” she says. “Stories often reduce people to caricatures. It’s important to acknowledge that people are complicated and to try to reflect that, even though it often leads to ambiguity. People want to be heard and feel like they’re being truly understood.”
Backstage with the Creators of Serial comes to Strathmore on Thursday, May 11. Buy tickets here.
