The hotly anticipated season will focus on controversial American POW Bowe Bergdahl. In the first episode, for the first time since he was brought back to America following a prisoner swap with the Haqqani Network in 2014, we hear Bergdahl tell his side of the story, in a series of interviews with Mark Boal, who wrote the screenplay for Zero Dark Thirty (with, uh, help from the CIA).
Season two of “Serial” promises to be very different than season one, which quickly became the most popular podcast ever and was eventually downloaded over 100 million times. That season focused on a case that had received very little national attention, that of Adnan Syed, who was convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, in 1999. Although much is still unknown about Bergdahl’s case, it has received significantly more attention and reporting.
But ultimately what is most notable about season two is the involvement of Bergdahl himself. While there has been much debate over what he intended to do when he left a military outpost in Afghanistan—some have said he wanted to defect—in the first episode, Bergdahl argues he was trying to create a crisis so he could discuss mismanagement in his unit with higher-ups. “I was trying to prove to myself, I was trying to prove to the world, to anybody who used to know me,” he tells Boal, “that I was capable of being that person.”
You can listen to season two of “Serial” here.