Serial Serial
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Serial returns with a history of Guantánamo told by people who lived through key moments in Guantánamo’s evolution, who know things the rest of us don’t about what it’s like to be caught inside an improvised justice system.
Serial Productions makes narrative podcasts whose quality and innovation transformed the medium. “Serial” began in 2014 as a spinoff of the public radio show “This American Life.” In 2020, we joined the New York Times Company. Our shows have reached many millions of listeners and have won nearly every major journalism award for audio, including the first-ever Peabody Award given to a podcast.
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Poor Baby Raul
Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again.
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The Special Project
In 2002, an elite interrogation team secretly staged Guantánamo’s most elaborate intel operation — to try to get a single detainee to talk.
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Ahmad the Iguana Feeder
An Arabic-speaking airman is sent to Guantánamo to translate, and soon finds himself at the center of a major scandal. Part 1: Suspicion swallows evidence.
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The Honeymooners
The case against a young airman gets even weirder when the government pulls in two fresh investigators. Part 2: A bride, an FBI agent, and a polygraph machine.
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The Big Chicken, Part 1
A new warden comes to Guantánamo and decides to make some changes. A prison’s a prison, he thinks. How hard could this be?
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Part 2, Asymmetry
After the worst happens at Guantánamo, the warden tries to explain it to the outside world – and to himself.
Customer Reviews
Interesting Letdown
Fantastic journalism, interesting to hear multiple viewpoints regardless of how much I disagree with them, however there is some revisionist history to the situation. It’s hard to find the line of where to apply modern ideals to moments in history.
Waited for…this?
Like so many others, I was a bit obsessed with season 1. That series rewrote the book on how to tell a story through podcasting. Just - wow. Season 2 was pretty cool, too. Not as mind blowing, but still a great listen. Season 3? An interesting story of a broader nature; interesting but perhaps too different from the earlier seasons to be part of the same podcast. And finally the wait for season 4 was over. Yeah…
All the great people and methods were in place, but this season was least compelling of all for me. I tried, I really tried. All the Gitmo things make up a chapter of our history that is important to recognize and acknowledge. But from the perspective of just wanting to hear a great story, it just wasn’t there for me. I finally gave up.
Not for Binary Thinkers
Someone must have posted about this on a conservative news source to draw all of these negative reviews. Guantanamo isn't a story with an end or even a well-defined plot, it's a real life never-ending morass. A complex, fascinating and horrifying story with no clear resolution in sight, even now. It's a newsworthy subject, but if you can't empathize with multiple viewpoints - or think that what the detainees did means they don't deserve due process or basic human dignity - you probably won't benefit much from listening to this, because it will be lost on you.