This was probably inevitable.
Serial—the zeitgeisty, ultra-popular true-crime podcast from This American Life producer Sarah Koenig—is getting its own TV series. No, it will not be an adaptation of the heartbreaking and mysterious murder that Koenig and her team investigated in its wildly popular first season, but rather a scripted cable series that follows the making of a podcast, inspired by Serial.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller—the versatile directing duo behind The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street—will develop the series, with Koenig and Serial producer Julie Snyder serving as executive producers.
The original podcast told the story of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old high school student in Baltimore, Maryland, who was found dead in a park not far from her school. The main suspect—and the man now serving a life sentence for her murder—was Lee’s ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed. Syed has insisted that he is completely innocent.
Fox 21 TV, the studio working with Lord and Miller to produce the TV series, confirmed to Quartz that it will make no reference to the Syed story. Instead, it will follow a completely new case.
It remains to be seen how compelling this behind-the-scenes story will be. Koenig and her team deserve a lot of credit for digging up the story, doing a lot of meticulous research and reporting, and packaging that all up into an extremely engrossing podcast.
But that’s not what made Serial a cultural phenomenon. What made it the subject of so many late-night binge sessions and water-cooler discussions was Lee’s murder itself. Very few people were up late wondering how Koenig reported on the story. They were up late wondering if Syed did it or not. An actual documentary showing the Serial team behind-the-scenes, reporting on a new case (in the same vein as HBO’s The Jinx) would perhaps be more compelling.
That said, we won’t write off this adaptation just yet. Lord and Miller are talents, and with Koenig involved in its production, it’ll most likely be accurate, clever, and at the very least, interesting to other journalists.
Lord, Miller, and their studio, Fox 21 Television, are currently looking for writers. From there, they’ll pitch the series to a cable channel. Koenig, meanwhile, is hard at work making the next season of Serial, which will reportedly look into the story of Bowe Bergdahl, a US Army sergeant who was captured by the Taliban under mysterious circumstances.
Whatever this TV adaptation ends up being, it will surely pale in comparison to Saturday Night Live‘s note-perfect parody of the podcast, starring Cecily Strong as Koenig:
Image by Casey Fiesler on Flickr, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.