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Comment by researcher88 | Hacker News Reader

I actively try to avoid 20/20 and Dateline crime mysteries. There are so many of these and they are so engaging, and often without any resolution beyond a "he said, she said". The only conclusion I can draw from them is that crime is often incredibly random and irrational, and everyone has credibility problems, real victims sometimes lie to exaggerate and the justice system is deeply flawed.

But I feel that it's disaster porn; gripping us by appealing to the worst of us.

I was excited for Serial until I realized what it is. I feel for the wrongly convicted, if that's indeed what happened, but I'm not watching/listening to be an activist against injustice. No, I'm just distracting myself without learning anything by absorbing scintillating details and pondering irrelevant mysteries.

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To be fair, Serial hasn't really taken a side on the matter, at least not yet. It's really been more about figuring out as much as possible, and doing it in an engaging way. Serial feels very much "about the story" to me.

As for just distracting yourself without learning anything, I feel you there, but at the same time most of us do it in numerous other ways such as reading fiction, or watching movies, so I don't feel for you too much.

The point of it is, it's legitimate snuff for the masses. Same reason SVU is on its 14th season. Noted psychologist Albert Ellis wrote a book on it in the 50's or 60's, when society's itch was mostly satisfied through gristly pulp detective novels. The reader (or viewer, or listener) gets to indulge in graphic death and horror, but also gets to maintain their view of themselves through a narrative that allows them to think of themselves on the 'good guys' side.

I actually think Serial is on the other side of the fence as SVU, Law & Order, and pulp detective novels.

Personally I've had a great takeaway from the podcast, not because of the sordid subject that's at the heart of it, but rather the amount of time and care the creators have spent looking at not just the crime, but also at the system and people that surround it.

Pop crime fiction teaches us a lot of things that Serial has gone to pains to refute - that eyewitness testimony is at all reliable, that people can recall mundane details of their lives at will, that a clear sequence of events is even possible to reconstruct, that the wrongly accused believe passionately in their own innocence, so on and so forth.

Serial has taken the popular notion of interviewing persons of interest, constructing a timeline, and catching people in brazen lies, and turned them upside down to expose the much more complicated behavior of humans underneath, and the fallibility of everything that these detective shows are based around.

The picture that Serial paints is markedly different from that of your typical crime drama, and that is an important takeaway. I think characterizing it as simply a gaudy way to "indulge in graphic death and horror" is overly cynical. In any case it certainly doesn't belong in the same sentence as any of the other crime fiction that portrays police work simplistically.

Indeed. In this era of jury pools being trained by forensic procedural shows to want nice animations reconstructing everything, it is very good for us all to hear how hard it can be to reconstruct the past. Even on things that seem like they should be easily knowable, like "was there a pay phone near the Best Buy or not?"

Learning is not only about absorbing discrete facts. Serial has taught me that there is often no objective truth that is discoverable in the real world.

For any real-world event, and for anyone involved, there are always three truths.

1) The truth, as remembered by the person who experienced it.

2) The truth, as reported and written down.

3) The truth, as it happened.

Any overlap with #3 is going to be mostly coincidental.

I wouldn't describe it as disaster porn. While the stories are certainly compelling as human drama, most of all I find this season of Serial to be a gripping look into a criminal investigation and justice system. It makes me think about the process of historiography, in general.

Serial isn't going to be a crime series. It's just long-form audio journalism/storytelling. The next season will be on a completely different topic.

If this is "disaster porn" then so is all flavors of media.

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