She’s back! Last year’s breakout podcast Serial has returned for its second season with host Sarah Koenig. The latest installment debuted on Thursday, Dec. 10, and revealed that it will follow a very different story than the first season.
“Our first season was about a murder case few people had heard about. Season Two is a story a gazillion people have heard about,” Koenig wrote in a release. (Season 1 investigated the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old student, and the involvement of her former boyfriend Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the crime.)
Season 2 will be centered around U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who famously left his post in Afghanistan in 2009 and was captured and held hostage by the Taliban for almost five years.
Koenig describes Bergdahl as “such an interesting and unusual guy, not like anyone I’ve ever encountered before.”
After returning to the U.S. in 2014, Bergdahl was called a deserter, and the military charged him with two crimes — one of which earned him a life sentence. His actions allegedly affected others in the military and the war in general.
Koenig, along with filmmaker Mark Boal, speak with Bergdahl on Serial to try to get to the bottom of why he decided to leave his post in 2009.
“Unlike our story in Season One, this one extends far out into the world,” Koenig says in her statement. “It reaches into swaths of the military, the peace talks to end the war, attempts to rescue other hostages, our Guantanamo policy. What Bergdahl did made me wrestle with things I’d thought I more or less understood, but really didn’t: what it means to be loyal, to be resilient, to be used, to be punished.”
Tell Us: Will you listen to Season 2 of Serial?
