'Serial' Season 3 Will Be Based In Cleveland

CLEVELAND — Famed podcast "Serial" will debut its third season on September 20 and the show's focus will shift to Northeast Ohio. Show creator and host Sarah Koenig has said her weekly podcast will feature day-to-day stories from an everyday court...in Cleveland.

“The mission,” Koenig told Cleveland Scene last week, “was to find out how the system works in a day-to-day, ground-floor way. You always hear, ‘It’s broken,’ and ‘It’s so out of whack.’ So we were just like, where can we see it? Where can we see how this works?”

Each episode will feature an ordinary case, according to the Serial website. Koenig was attracted by the access she received at the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas and the universality of the docket. The cases in Cleveland are like the cases in any other city.

The Serial podcast first earned national attention in late 2014, when season one premiered. The initial episodes focused on the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and her then-convicted killer Adnan Syed. Syed's conviction was overturned in 2016 and he was granted a new trial — a trial that continues to drag on.

The second season of the show focused on Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier accused of desertion after being kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Now Koenig will turn her attention to the muddled state of American court systems...and she's using Cleveland to discuss those issues. We're all ears.

Serial Season 3 debuts September 20 and can be listened to by clicking here, or on Pandora, for free.

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Photo from Rick Uldricks