


Syed was eventually arrested and convicted of Lee’s murder in the first degree. The Baltimore police had already begun to investigate call records from a cell phone belonging to her ex-boyfriend, Syed, a Pakistani American. On February 9, a passer-by found Lee’s body. After she failed to pick up her young cousin from school on the afternoon of January 13, 1999, Lee’s family reported her missing. In 1999, she was a Woodlawn High School senior in Baltimore, Maryland. Lee was the daughter of Korean immigrants. Footnote 2 In her blog post titled “Beautiful” Dead Korean Girl? Elisabeth Donnelly emphasized the racial and gendered tone of the reporting surrounding the murder. In 1999, the Baltimore Sun reported that Lee’s strangled body was found buried in a shallow grave in the woods of Baltimore, Maryland. Season One of Serial reported on the case of Adnan Syed, who in 2000 was convicted of the kidnapping and first-degree murder of his former girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Finally, we observe the phenomenon of Serial as a pre-eminent example of the genre of the true-crime realist narrative within a digital frame.Ībout Season One: the murder of Hae Min Lee We are also interested in how Serial exists as a product of digital culture and also resembles more traditional narrative genres: the serialized Victorian novel and the detective story. We aim to consider how Serial reveals new patterns of digital audience engagement and highlights increasing possibilities for the retelling of a story across social media. Footnote 1 This paper focuses on the digital-narrative structure of Season One of Serial, and what we term “co-consumption,” to characterize the experience of listeners and their relationship to the emerging digital-narrative form.

At the time of writing, there are three seasons, which aired Fall 2014, Winter 2015–2016, and Fall 2018. Hosted by journalist Sarah Koenig, and punning on its own name, Serial was broadcast episodically, telling a real-life story in weekly intervals. Serial is a podcast from the producers of This American Life, a weekly public radio show that tells themed stories.
