Serial Is Back

Time to immediately cancel all your plans for the foreseeable future because the second series of the podcast, Serial, has launched. The first series centred on the case of Adnan Syed, a teenager who was potentially, wrongly convicted of killing his high school girlfriend. Narrated by our favourite voice on the air-waves, Sarah Koenig (with support from frikkin’ Mail Chimp), Serial was originally a spin off from This American Life but its popularity was such that it was downloaded more than a 100 million times and even the theme song was parodied. This series will focus on the story of Sgt Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier who spent five years in Taliban captivity. Bergdahl has been accused of being an army "deserter" and will now tell his story for the first time. In 2009 he walked away from his base in Afghanistan, igniting a mass manhunt. Bergdahl insists he had no intention of deserting but was instead attempting to report problems with army leadership. He was released in May 2014 as part of an exchange with people being held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay. Episode one, titled: "DUSTWUN", launched on Apple's iTunes podcast service, but the traffic was so vast that the site crashed (it’s now been restored). Within minutes of the news that the second instalment was here, both Serial and Bowe Bergdahl started trending on social media. Ms Koenig is anticipating a run of about eight to ten episodes but warns that this is subject to change. Excited doesn’t cover it.