The Serial podcast crew is expanding under a new production company, reports Vulture . Appropriately named Serial Productions, the company will produce additional podcasts on top of future seasons of the main podcast, Serial .
On top of this announcement came the news that Serial Productions will be producing a new show titled S-Town . According to Vulture , Serial senior producer Julie Snyder described the project as “arty” and “novelistic.” Rolling Stone reports that Snyder and S-Town producer Brian Reed had been working on the show long before Serial ever launched.
Vulture also published a section of the Serial Productions press release, which includes hints as to the content of S-Town . The story follows a man in a small Alabama town who wanted a reporter from This American Life to investigate claims that a member of a local wealthy family had gotten away with murder. The story spirals from there into “a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure and the mysteries of one man’s life.”
Furthermore, International Business Times reports on comments from Crime Writers On podcast host Rebecca Lavoie , who says that S-Town may also involve a real-life treasure hunt of special note for the Alabama listeners. Lavoie speculates that the treasure hunt will focus on the search for a cache of gold worth about $100,000.
This isn’t the first time a podcast has expanded to encompass a certain brand of storytelling. The immensely popular Welcome to Night Vale began in 2012 as simply a podcast; now, it headlines the independent podcast company Night Vale Presents , which features several shows that are wildly different in content but maintain the surrealist tone for which the Welcome to Night Vale podcast is best known.
With S-Town , Serial Productions is preparing to do the same thing for serialized nonfiction stories. It’s a smart move, because Serial ‘s explosive internet popularity led to a renewed interest in true-crime stories, just as Welcome to Night Vale generated interest in more fiction podcasts. In addition to the deluge of true-crime and other serialized nonfiction podcasts , the television industry jumped into the field headfirst as well, with everything from Netflix’s Making a Murderer to the award-winning American Crime Story : The People vs. O.J. Simpson on FX.
Serial originally launched in October 2014 as a spin-off of This American Life . The first season told the story of the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and her convicted ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed, as the podcast’s team (including the on-air voice of Serial , Sarah Koenig) sifted through the evidence, court trials, and interviews with the people involved to determine Syed’s innocence or guilt.
Season 2 was co-produced with Mark Boal, the writer-producer of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty , and his production company Page One. Boal and the Serial team had a common interest in Bowe Bergdahl, the American soldier charged with deserting his Army unit in Afghanistan. Bergdahl was subsequently captured and held by the Taliban for five years until then-President Barack Obama cut a deal for his release in May 2014. The season’s big mystery focused on whether or not Bergdahl’s reasons for deserting the Army base were justified.
The subject of Serial Season 3 has yet to be announced, but International Business Times notes that Koenig and other producers of the podcast have been spotted at the trial of a Cleveland, Ohio man accused of murdering three people in a barbershop . This may indicate that Season 3 will return to the true-crime drama of Season 1 after the second season’s examination of the Bergdahl case left some listeners feeling unsatisfied.
Serial Productions has yet to set a launch date for Serial Season 3 beyond the vague “summer 2017” window, but S-Town is set to premiere in March. If the series follows Serial Season 2’s bi-weekly episode releases, that means the show could easily hand off to the parent show at its conclusion, giving listeners a long-term podcast commitment for the hot summer days to come.
[Featured Image by Mike Coppola/Getty Images]