Pass It On: ‘Serial’ Now Has A Parody Series, And It Is Excellent

We’ve already acknowledged how much we love This American Life‘s new longform non-fiction podcast, Serial — but the episodic true crime story has come with a few problems.

For one, there’s the format itself: there’s something fundamentally uneasy about turning the murder of an innocent teenage girl into a scintillating story, omitting key players and known information and ending episodes with cliffhanger questions just to keep the audience interested. For another, there’s the question of narration: for all of host Sarah Koenig’s attempts to present herself as an unreliable narrator — this happens every time she acknowledges bias or a mistake, or makes producer Dana part of a story (“There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib!”) — we still forget that she knows more than she’s letting on.

And for a third, there’s the race problem. In The Awl‘s ‘Serial and White Reporter Privilege‘, published overnight, Jay Caspian Kang discusses the “whitewashing and stereotyping” that results from having a white reporter tell the story of an immigrant Muslim man, convicted of the murder of a daughter of Korean immigrants — to say nothing of the fact that, for most of the series, Koenig has been calling into question the testimony of a black teenage male.

“While I am willing to cut Serial enough slack to regard it as an experiment in form,” he writes, “I am still disturbed by the thought of Koenig stomping around communities that she clearly does not understand, digging up small, generally inconsequential details about the people inside of them, and subjecting it all to that inimitable This American Life process of tirelessly, and sometimes gleefully, expressing her neuroses over what she has found.”

This is to say: your fave is problematic, and ripe for a bit of parody.

Which is where this delightfully meta clip from comedian Paul Laudiero comes in.

“Huh. Atlantic City. Adnan Syed. Both starting with the initials “A”, “S”. How had I not noticed that before? I guess my cold-calling worked. And not only that, but “Atlantic City” was also a perfect anagram for “Adnan Syed”. What did it all mean?

Uploaded overnight, the above parody is actually part of a series Laudiero has been putting together for the past few weeks.

It starts here, with a phone call:

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This next episode features an investigation into MailKimp:

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Here, they look a little deeper into Best Buy:

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And here they seek expert comment on storytelling here:

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To subscribe to Paul Laudiero’s YouTube channel, head here.