1. I am listening to Serial season 2. Are you? Maybe it's the Kool-Aid talking, but I think Sarah Koenig is just the best. When I started listening to episode 1 of this season of Serial, I all of a sudden remembered how good she is at this, how her podcast is better than any other podcast I listen to.
Season 2 is obviously a different animal than season 1, and so far, that is fine with me. The whole conceit with Serial is that there isn't one - it's just a story, told week by week (now biweekly! or fortnightly?). I find this story - the saga of Bowe Berghdal - fascinating, even if it doesn't make me pine for...Thursdays? Fridays? - it proves my point that I can't even pinpoint which day it shows up in iTunes - the same way that season 1 did. But I trust Sarah and her zoom analogy! THE ZOOM OUT IS COMING.
2. I am not watching Making a Murderer. The reasons are, first of all, that I listened to Radiolab's "Are You Sure?" episode a few years ago, and I found the story of Steven Avery so bizarre that immediately upon finishing that episode, I looked up all the details I could online. I watched the first three episodes of MaM a couple of weeks ago and I just felt like, I already know this story and I don't want to spend 10 hours of my life on it, not least because it's a really awful, squicky tale. If I had gone into it unspoiled...well, I still probably would have Googled everything and been done with it.
But yes, well done documentary, spellbinding story, frustrating that it's still not resolved, etc. Which person do you love to hate? My vote is for Brendan Dassey's lawyer who loves the cameras, or his investigator who seems to maybe be working for the prosecution? Seriously, what the heck. Also that sheriff (?) who held that press conference that was unsuitable for children's ears. It was like some horrible television show.