Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MOARDONGZPLZ | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'll provide a counterpoint: I really love listening to podcasts (quick plug for the "Keepin' It 1600" podcast as my favorite recently) and often in the crime and justice genre. I mostly got to listening to Serial because I've been listening to This American Life for a decade; I consider TAL to have about 70% good content with occasional really good ones (ex: the one explaining the financial crisis) and occasionally truly terrible ones (ex: the one with the guy trying to find the origin of a particular hold music tune). Just stating this so you know where I'm coming from, a background of my tastes.

I found Serial to be grating and and not very good at keeping my attention. I really didn't understand the hype at all and I really had to force myself to sit through the last couple episodes just so I could say I finished (I got a similar feeling when approaching the last episode of the second season of True Detective). I didn't find the story compelling at all.

Personally I enjoyed the hold music tone episode. I think I like the investigative quality and the back and forth questioning that slowly reveals the layers of a situation.

The ones I have a hard time listening to are the ones where they have an actor read an excerpt a book. Sometimes it's interesting, and sometimes, it's just a guy reading a book.

Considering the weekend content of HN, I'd bet that there's been a conversation over that segment at some point.

You have a higher tolerance for grating. I find TAL impossible to listen to weekly.

It embodies the elements of NPR that drive me nuts, without the pledge drive to give me a time out period. :)

Mostly off-topic, but if you haven't heard it before, you'd probably enjoy giving Criminal[0] a listen.

  [0]: http://thisiscriminal.com/

The new podcast More Perfect from Radiolab seems to quite good in this genre as well. It is stories based the US supreme court cases.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect

I also will act as a recommendation engine and suggest you listen to Detective (the first season is really really good).

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/detective/id1029038371

I agree, but I give them credit for attempting to do what they ultimately did not pull off: to find a smoking gun that changes a murder case, in near-real-time, for an audience of millions.

As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of time on the show.

But I was rooting for them right up to the point at which I began cursing them.

The fact that he now has a new trial should be enough to make up for that. The "smoking gun" was that there was no real case against him, but he was convicted and in jail.

>As a listener, this meant I honestly felt like I had wasted a huge amount of time on the show.

That seems like such a weird conclusion to me.

The show was packaged up and delivered as titillating entertainment. A first-person radio whodunnit for the post-radio age.

So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!", I felt like I'd clicked on a series of those "What happened next will shock you!" headlines.

A compelling story reaching the same conclusion probably could have been handled in a single episode.

> So, many weeks later, when the final word was "gosh maybe we'll never know!"

But... that's the point. The finally episode spells this out very explicitly - although they can't say either way whether he did it or not, they found they don't have sufficient proof they he did commit the crime he was convicted for, and therefore does not deserve to be in jail.

What both series were good at pointing out was the nature of a fair trial, and how each case fell short.

It must get better, but I couldn't get through the first episode, which is odd, since I generally enjoy documentaries and dramatizations of true crime or investigative journalism.

Why is it good to listen to a show you dislike just to say you finished it?

Social skills?

Sunk cost fallacy. I find myself doing that with TV series too. I'll binge watch a few seasons and then it gets bad. I also know that sometimes better writers come on during different seasons so I'll slog through the bad ones in the hope that a good season will appear. I could just look up episode ratings on IMDB and skip around, but then there is the problem of missing pieces of large story arcs.

Well, in addition to what others had said, I was hoping there would be a conclusion in this case. I felt a bit invested in the story and didn't know there would essentially be no conclusion at the end. If I had known, I probably would not have finished it.

When the A team took a break from TAL to ship Serial, TAL really suffered and it hasn't come back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com