Within the past few years, a strange point of debate has circulated among the writers of thrillers and mysteries: given the violence inherent to the genre, what are our responsibilities when it comes to the crimes we portray on the page? There’s a sense, perhaps owing to the increasing belief amongst writers of all stripes that storytelling is now a form of activism, that even fictional stabbings, shootings, and disembowelments need to be rendered with care — or, at least, in keeping with a broad commitment to social justice.
It’s hard to say if this debate has produced more sensitive depictions of fictional murder, or how to quantify the notion of harm when the person you’re killing never actually existed to begin with. It’s easier to locate the source of this anxiety. There has been, in the last decade, an absolute blurring of the lines not just between entertainment and activism, but between lurid tales of fictional murder and the real crimes, real tragedies, that happen to real people.
Responsible for this, at least in part, is the boom in true crime podcasts — a boom that shows no sign of slowing. Shows like My Favorite Murder or Dr. Death boast tens of millions of loyal listeners; investigative journalists have won coveted awards for In the Dark and S-Town; and podcasts are not only being adapted for TV (Dirty John) but parodied in killer comedies (Only Murders in the Building). But one podcast, and one story, started it all — a story that seems to have reached its final act this week.
On 19th September, Adnan Sayed, the subject of the breakout podcast Serial, was released from the prison. He had served 23 years of a life sentence for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, whose partially-buried body was discovered in a Baltimore park in the February of 1999. For 8 of those years, journalist Sarah Koenig has been chronicling the case for Serial, documenting the flaws in the prosecution — as well as the flaws in the defence. Syed has always maintained his innocence.
The wave of interest generated by Serial, which included record-breaking downloads and international media coverage, led to a renewed interest in Syed’s trial. The focus raised uncomfortable questions about the fairness of the criminal justice system regardless of how you felt about the question of his guilt (Serial‘s audience was split on this). Books were written; TV specials were filmed; another podcast, this one produced by Syed’s childhood friend Rabia Chaudry and openly dedicated to proving his innocence, sought to keep the case in the public eye.
While Koenig had always maintained a journalist’s distance and objectivity, the new spate of Syed-related content was different, something between a spectator sport and a soap opera— one for which the public had begun to crave, or even expect, a Hollywood-worthy ending. Adnan Syed was starting to feel more like a mythological figure than a real person, and his story more like a thrilling crime drama than what it actually was: a complicated and tangled glimpse into the dysfunctional underbelly of criminal justice. That the mythology surrounding him might be bullshit — or that he might in fact be guilty — became unsayable, if not unthinkable.
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