Serial returns for season four on Thursday Mar 28

The New York Times and Serial Productions today announced that Serial will return with a new nine-episode season on Thursday, March 28. In Season Four, host Sarah Koenig is joined by Dana Chivvis to tell the history of Guantanamo through the personal stories of those on the ground who know things the rest of us don’t.

This year marks Serial’s 10th anniversary; the first season aired in 2014 and revolutionized the podcast industry.

Listeners can subscribe to “Serial” wherever podcasts are available and on the NYT Audio app. The first two episodes launch on Thursday, March 28, with episodes released weekly after that.

“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 Sarah 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.”

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 Four is a human-scale history of Guantanamo, told by the people who lived through decisive moments in Guantanamo’s evolution, who have seen firsthand the second and third-order effects of an improvised justice system.

Dana Chivvis is a longtime producer and reporter for “Serial” and “This American Life.” Jessica Weisberg produced this season, with additional reporting from Cora Currier.

Audible is the official launch sponsor of “Serial” Season Four.

Serial Productions is the maker of the blockbuster podcasts “Serial” and “S-Town,” with more than 743 million total downloads. In previous seasons, “Serial” investigated a murder case, told the story of the court martial of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, and spent a year inside Cleveland’s criminal courts. In July 2020, Serial Productions became part of The New York Times Co. Together they have launched several shows, including “Nice White Parents,” a chart-topping series about the powerful forces shaping public schools; “The Improvement Association,” a captivating true story about election fraud; “The Trojan Horse Affair,” an investigative series about the mystery behind a scandal that rocked Britain; “We Were Three,” an intimate look at how Covid affected one family; “The Coldest Case in Laramie,” a limited series confronting conflicting stories behind a decades-old unsolved homicide case; “The Retrievals,” a textured story about the treatment of women in medical settings; and, most recently, “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.