Season three of everyone's favourite podcast, 'Serial,' will make the jump to TV

Serial, the first podcast program to ever win the prestigious Peabody Award, is making the leap to television. HBO has announced that the program’s third season, which focussed on major imbalances and flaws in the criminal justice system in Cleveland, will be the basis for a drama that centres on a cop and a man he’s been accused of assaulting. Podcast creator Sarah Koenig will executive produce the limited series, as will basketball-star-turned-media-mogul, LeBron James. James’ SpringHill Productions media company will be helming the project which has yet to be given a title.

Serial did things a little differently in Season 3, switching gears from following the story of one subject and the people who surrounded him (Adnan Syed in its debut run and Bowe Bergdahl in Season 2), and instead examining the justice system of an entire city. The season included recordings of courtroom proceedings, meetings in judges’ chambers, conversations in hallways, and arguments in lawyers’ offices. “Inside these ordinary cases we found the troubling machinery of the criminal justice system on full display,” writes the Serial team in their Season 3 synopsis. “We followed those cases outside the building, into neighborhoods, into people’s houses, and into prison.”

Meaning: you can expect an ensemble cast when this Serial adaptation makes it to the screen. Producers have tapped Shola Amoo, who wrote and directed the 2019 drama The Last Tree, to write the script for the show, but no casting decisions have been made yet.

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In 2015, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the creative team behind The Lego Movie) fought hard to win the rights to adapt Serial’s first season into a visual medium, intending to write and direct a series based on the making of the podcast, rather than one that focussed on the murder of high schooler Hae Min Lee.

Since its third season, Serial, which originally spun out of the wildly popular This American Life podcast, has put out a new project, Nice White Parents. It too is destined for the small screen with HBO. The network has picked Issa Rae and Adam McKay to star.

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