It is Fall 2015 and the world is still waiting for Season 2 of the Serial podcast from Sarah Koenig and her friends at This American Life. However, there are a couple of updates both in how one will be able to listen to Season 2 and what is going on with Adnan Syed since Season 1.
A new platform
After around 100 million downloads of Serial's first season, the podcast is adding a new listening platform choice: Pandora, the online music streaming website.
The podcast will remain available on iTunes and on the Serial website.
Season 1 will be available on Pandora beginning Nov. 24. Season 2 is slated for "Fall 2015," so any day at this point it could pop up in your podcast app.
A reopened case for Adnan
The murder case against Adnan Syed was investigated during Serial's first season. Keonig made it very clear to listeners that the podcast was not complete when the first episode aired. There was always room for new evidence to be found or for new people to come forward to speak.
Asia McClain was one such person. She claims that Syed was in the school library when his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, was murdered. Therefore he could not have committed the murder for which he was convicted.
Syed's argument for reopening the case is that his now deceased defense attorney did not do her due diligence and present McClain's testimony to the court.
In his ruling, Judge Martin P. Welch wrote:
"...this Court concludes that, in its own discretion, reopening the post-conviction proceedings would be in the interests of justice for all parties."
The ruling also allows for the court to consider the cell-tower evidence which the prosecution used to place Syed in Leakin Park when Lee was buried there. Part of this evidence that describes such data as unreliable when using incoming calls to identify the location of a cell phone. This portion of the evidence was never presented.
A hearing date has not been set.
An anonymous source
Season 2 will not be a continuation of Syed's case. That much is known for a fact. However, in late September The New York Times wrote that the second season would focus on the story of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an Army solider who went missing from his base in Afghanistan in 2009. He became a Taliban prisoner and was freed in a 2014 prisoner trade between the Taliban and the United States.
This information is credited to "a person familiar with the project" by The Times, but it has not been confirmed on the record by anyone associated with Serial.
The launch date for Season 2 is also still a mystery. Maybe that's what the next season will be about: The case of Serial's second season.
(h/t to The Huffington Post and The New York Times)
