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Return to Guantánamo
A fourth Serial season dusts off American terror’s old machinery.
On the surface, Guantánamo Bay may seem like an unlikely target for Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder, and the Serial team, still principally remembered for spectacle generated from the first season’s real-time true-crime reporting on the case of Adnan Syed. Eschewing the serialized structure that gave the show its name, the season is built on short stories drawing direct testimony from a gallery of individuals — detainees, guards, wardens, intelligence personnel, translators — who knew the place firsthand. You’ll often hear the critique that the show never successfully replicated the energy of that first season, even as Serial Productions, the studio spun out from This American Life to house Koenig and Snyder’s future projects, continues to be a reliable publisher of popular podcasts, including S-Town and, more recently, The Retrievals.
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