Popular podcast “Serial” features interviews from Bergdahl

The mega-hit is back, this time investigating Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier captured by the Taliban and accused of deserting his unit.

Koenig, who narrates the podcast, said before agreeing to tell Bergdahl’s side she was a “very uneducated consumer of this story”.

Now they’ve dropped the surprise first episode of their second season.

“As a private first-class, nobody is going to listen to me”, Bergdahl says in the first episode of the podcast, released Thursday.

The podcast that made podcasts cool is back, dropping Episode One of its second season without fanfare at 6:15 a.m. today.

Geb. Robert B. Abrams is expected to decide in the coming weeks what charges Bergdahl should face.

The first season of Serial focused on questions about the murder conviction of young Maryland man.

Bergdahl is charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with one count of Article 85, “Desertion with Intent to Shirk Important or Hazardous Duty”, and one count of Article 99, “Misbehavior Before The Enemy by Endangering the Safety of a Command, Unit or Place”. “Within days – within hours of his rescue, in fact – people began saying that we shouldn’t be celebrating him, because Bowe Bergdahl deliberately walked off his post into hostile territory”.

He was released following a prisoner exchange, which sparked a nationwide debate over whether Sergeant Bergdahl was a traitor (for walking off his post) or a whistleblower wanting to draw attention to issues with the leadership of his platoon. He returned home in 2014, when the Obama administration swapped him for five Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In a blog post, Koenig noted that the Bergdahl case has already been widely covered, but said “it spins out in so many unexpected directions” that people don’t know about.

The podcast has also had its rights optioned to come to TV, but with a catch, as the proposed cable series about Serial would be based on the experience of creating the podcast. Will this story end well for Bergdahl (who is now awaiting legal proceedings for two crimes against him)?

He adds: “It’s like you’re standing there, screaming in your mind”.

New episodes of the podcast will bow on Thursdays through the “Serial” website as well as on Pandora. Reportedly, this season two of Serial is working toward a film that Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) will direct.

“You know, that I could be what it is that all those guys out there that go to the movies and watch those movies, they all want to be that, but I wanted to prove that I was that”.