How ‘Serial’ changed true crime and podcasting forever

In 2014, the story of Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee gripped the world. But the crime in question happened 15 years earlier.

Lee, a Baltimore-area high school student, was strangled to death in 1999. Her then-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested, charged with first-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

But did Syed really do it? Was he locked up for a heinous murder or, as he claimed, falsely imprisoned for a crime he never committed?

That’s the central premise of the first season of Serial, the seminal true-crime podcast, which debuted 10 years ago. A team from This American Life—namely, host Sarah Koenig and producer Julie Snyder—had taken up the mantle of investigating the ins and out’s of the Lee murder, and walking their listeners through every thought, step, and conclusion as they worked in real time. It was a view into the mind of top radio journalists as they grappled with conflicting feelings, evidence, and personalities to try to do the tough work of sorting fact from fiction. In doing so, they inadvertently ushered in a new renaissance of the true crime genre.

“Serial was a game-changer for the true crime genre,” says Ashley Flowers, creator and co-host of the podcast Crime Junkie. “It was the first piece of work in the medium that achieved mainstream success without using a sensationalized or dramatized approach.”

Serial, it turned out, was more than a hit. It was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, a rare monocultural moment at a time when popular media was rapidly becoming disaggregated and individualized through social media and streaming algorithms. But its buoyant theme song and goofy Mailchimp (“Mail-kimp!”) advertisements became ubiquitous for a time—and so did water-cooler debate of whether or not Syed was guilty.

It was a whodunit for the 21st century. And a moment when the fates of the podcast medium and the true crime genre merged for good.

‘Podcasting has shown what the listener wants’

When Serial debuted on October 3, 2014, only 30% of Americans had ever listened to a podcast, according to Edison Research. By 2024, that number more than doubled to 67%—or 192 million people. These days, 98 million Americans listen to podcasts every week.

That’s not to say Serial created the genre of true crime. Television shows like Dateline and 48 Hours had long cultivated devoted viewerships—especially among female audiences. But Serial’s, well, serialized nature, also brought a degree of narrative tension to the format that had largely been missing from documentary-style true crime.

Gabriel Soto, the senior research director at Edison Research, says that podcasts allow journalists to “deep-dive and borderline obsess” over a case or topic, especially in contrast with primetime television, in which producers have to squeeze a lot of information into a fixed one-hour or two-hour special. “Podcasting has shown what the listener wants. They want facts, they want transparent reporting and as many details as possible,” he says. “Podcasting ushered in this more detailed, even more victim-centered coverage of crime cases and topics that you can’t get anywhere else.”

But contrary to some misplaced credit, it wasn’t the catalyst for the success of all podcasts since, says Lindsey Sherrill, a business communication professor at the University of North Alabama and scholar of true crime.  Rather, it was merely a great show that debuted at the right moment in media history. Podcasting, she says, was “growing but not necessarily super mainstream.”

Serial came right before many major updates to the iPhone and Android podcast apps, so the biggest spikes in overall podcast listenership actually came a year or two after it aired, says Sherrill. But some of those changes were also happening in the car with Bluetooth becoming readily available in vehicles before Serial debuted. “That probably had a huge amount to do with the podcast growth at that time.”

‘Koenig let herself be part of the story’

For Ashley Flowers, Serial was where it all began. It was the first podcast she ever listened to and inspired her in more ways than one. Sarah Koenig and Dana Chivvis brought the story to life, Flowers says, making it feel like she was along for the ride. “It made me realize that there was space to tell stories that could shine a light on the lesser-known cases and victims who might not otherwise have a voice,” Flowers says. “And if done right, there could be real-world outcomes to investigating these stories.”

Flowers is the creator and co-host of Crime Junkie, which regularly ranks in the top 10 podcasts on the Apple charts.

In addition to inspiring her work, Flowers says that the first season of Serial set the tone for how true crime podcasts sound. “Koenig let herself be part of the story, and I think that’s the biggest thing that has permeated so many of the other long-form series I’ve seen come out,” she says.

It was a proving ground, in a sense, that true crime—as a genre—made sense for the emerging podcast medium.

Sherrill also says intimacy was a big part of this phenomenon. “Serial is part of that whole style of the narrator sharing their feelings, discussing their thought process, being really transparent with how they’re working through these questions that show up in podcasting across genres now,” she says. “It’s just a very different stylistic choice than what we were used to hearing from radio journalism.”

Serial was a return to a simpler time in media, a tune-in-next-week ode to radio shows of the past. But it also opened the floodgates for a deluge of true crime media, a hyperfixation on the unsolved, too-hastily-solved, and eeriest cases in society. It was a Pandora’s box moment for true crime—before the genre still felt novel and fresh living in our smartphones, before it was ubiquitous.