Sarah Koenig and LeBron James to adapt Serial season 3 into a limited series for HBO
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Per The Hollywood Reporter, season three of the hit podcast Serial is potentially heading to HBO as a limited series. Host Sarah Koenig and LeBron James will co-executive produce the project, which is currently in early development. Screenwriter Shola Amoo, who wrote and directed Sundance darling The Last Tree, is set to executive produce, direct, and pen the script for the yet-to-be-titled series.
According to THR, the show will “follow a young cop and the man he’s accused of beating as the potential series illuminates the flawed inner workings of a middle-American courthouse and how the system impacts everyone it touches, from cops to lawyers and citizens accused of and victimized by crimes.”
The podcast, created by This American Life, has become a breeding ground of sorts for potential large-scale HBO adaptations. The instantly popular debut season of the audio luminary—which followed the complicated case of Adnan Syed and the murder of Hae Min Lee—was originally optioned for an adaptation that was part of a bidding war. HBO ended up producing a four-part documentary called The Case Against Adnan Syed, which was nominated for an Emmy. An offshoot of Serial, Nice White Parents, is getting the pilot treatment with Issa Rae and Adam McKay attached as executive producers.
11 Comments
If they do the first couple of seasons, I’ll watch, but season 3 was terrible. Raisin Bran? Come on! Finish the Marshmallow Trilogy first!
Obviously Lucky Charms are season 1.
Season 2 I guess is Marshmallow Alpha-Bits, but you’re going to lose a lot of listeners there.
What finishes off the trilogy? Rice Krispies Treats cereal? Kind of feels forced if we haven’t even introduced Snap, Crackle, or Pop yet. To me, Raisin Bran is a smart choice, just the rise and fall of the California Raisins is interesting in its own, then you’ve got the Kellogs coating their raisins in sugar and the two-scoops sun and the final perfection of the genre in Raisin Nut Bran. Plenty of good material to work with there.
Huh? The second season of Serial was so boring that I didn’t even know there was a third season.
The third season is easily the best season. It really benefits from showing you the casual injustices that happen everyday. Also, I’m from Cleveland, so that added to my interests, but it really is quite good.
Agreed. S3 was rage inducing precisely because it DIDN’T focus on a well known case of police brutality. It just showed what a nightmare the justice system is for anyone who gets caught up in its workings. Ep 1 was all about a woman who got caught up in a bar fight and got charged with punching a cop, even though the security camera footage clearly showed it wasn’t her. Even though she was innocent she still lost her job because she had to miss nine days of work for court appearances, and she then took a plea deal for a misdemeanor. It’s repeated on the show: the justice system sees misdemeanor as innocent. It’s only 9 episodes and well worth your time.
Seriously? I thought it was really interesting. To each their own I suppose.
Same
I thought the second season was the best one, a helpful recounting of a story that had been badly reported in the first place. The third was pretty good except for the episodes that were just ‘Sarah Koenig talks at length to and about a prisoner she finds interesting’. (The non-Koenig episodes are fantastic.)
Right? I don’t think I made it through the second episode of the second season. The case they were covering was so cut and dry that I didn’t understand why it was being covered in such a podcast at all: the dude was in the military and ran from base, doesn’t matter how scared or whatever he was, he knowingly and admittedly did something he wasn’t supposed to, and things got worse because of it. I’ve seen so many more interesting questionable cases covered on the likes of Youtube that I don’t understand how or why they chose that lame story to focus on.
Until we finally get to the bottom of the payphone at Best Buy, I’m not interested in any more Serial.
Season 1 was great, but I quit halfway through season 2, and was unaware there was a third season. Season 2 was boring in large part because the narrative was not open to much interpretation and kept trying to force it. It seemed like Bergdahl joined the army to punch terrorists in the face, then realized early on it was a lot of crappy grunt work. So in a hissy fit, he walked off base, got caught by the wrong group of people and suffered for it. All the stuff about “trying to raise awareness of terrible conditions” or whatever seemed like a CYA attempt after he was told “don’t do this” and he did it. Connecting to that story was hard.