‘Serial’ Season 4 To Focus On History Of Guantanamo; Podcast Premiere Date Set

EXCLUSIVE: Serial will be back in March with its long-awaited fourth season. The popular podcast will return for a nine-episode fourth season on March 28, with a focus on Guantanamo.

The announcement was made today by Serial host Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder and Dana Chivvis at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, an annual event that explores the art of sound and storytelling, during a session moderated by PJ Vogt (Search Engine).

The first two episodes launch on Thursday, March 28, with episodes released weekly after that.

In Season 4, Koenig and Chivvis tell the history of Guantanamo through the personal stories of those on the ground.

This year also marks Serial’s 10th anniversary.

“It’s fitting that this show is coming out on Serial’s 10th anniversary, because we’ve been trying to make a show about Guantanamo for almost a decade,” said Koenig. “Dana and I tried for years to figure out how to make a story that captures what it’s really like there for the people caught inside this massive, flawed experiment – not just the prisoners, but also the staff who built it and ran it. For so long, all the best stories we heard were off the record. But now people are ready to talk.”  

Per the description: The Guantanamo detention camp was supposed to be temporary. The U.S. government created it right after 9/11 to hold people suspected of being Taliban or Al Qaeda. But over the next two decades it hardened into an American institution with its own rules, its own prison, its own court. 

Koenig and Chivvis and their team interviewed more than 100 people for this season: guards, interrogators, commanders, lawyers, chaplains, translators – and former prisoners.

“Serial Season 4 is a human-scale history of Guantanamo, told by the people who lived through decisive moments in Guantanamo’s evolution, who know things the rest of us don’t about the second and third-order effects of an improvised justice system,” according to the synopsis.

Chivvis is a longtime producer and reporter for Serial and This American Life. Jessica Weisberg produced Season 4 with additional reporting from Cora Currier. The podcast is produced by Serial Productions, which is owned by The New York Times.

Serial Productions is behind podcasts Serial and S-Town, with more than 743 million total downloads. They were followed by the most recent Serial podcast The Kids of Rutherford County, a narrative series produced in partnership with ProPublica and WPLN Nashville Public Radio. The series was a winner of a 2023 George Polk award for investigative reporting in podcasting.