Sarah Koenig’s METRO brings the Serial team to New York City
Sarah Koenig has a new podcast, and you can listen today. METRO with Sarah Koenig launched Thursday, October 22 with two episodes, made by Serial Productions and the Metro desk of The New York Times. New episodes arrive every other Thursday, according to the launch announcement.
It is the first show Koenig has hosted since Serial, which debuted in October 2014 and ran for four seasons. Julie Snyder, who co-created Serial with her, is the executive producer.
The pitch is simple: stories about New York City and the people in it. The feed’s own description promises “investigations, personal stories, essays and interviews that take the bigness of New York and make it human-scale and relevant, no matter where you live.”
Episode 1, “Nice to Meet You,” runs 17 minutes. Koenig tours the city asking New Yorkers what they are worrying about. The episode note lists the answers: “Crime? Sure. The new mayor? Yes. Their weak, little handshakes? All the time.” Episode 2, “Karat and Schtick,” runs 40 minutes and follows TraxNYC, a diamond district store that doubled its business after a video showed its owner in a brawl with a rival jeweler. Koenig’s question: how much of it is real and how much is for show?
Koenig sounds glad to be out of the years-long investigation business. “New Yorkers are the best talkers and storytellers,” she said in the announcement, calling the show “almost too easy to produce” and admitting she is “having an unseemly amount of fun.”
That matters because Serial Productions has spent the six years since it joined the Times on long, heavy series: Nice White Parents, The Trojan Horse Affair, The Retrievals, The Good Whale, as TheWrap lists them. METRO is shorter, lighter and more frequent, and we think that is the right call for a team whose best work has always been Koenig talking to ordinary people.
One detail to watch: the announcement says every other week, while the feed’s blurb says “each week.” The trailer, posted Friday, October 16, says every other week too, so plan on a new episode every second Thursday.
Serial listeners already got a nudge. The first episode went into the Serial feed on Thursday as a “Special Preview.” On PlayPodcast, METRO is already No. 1 in our documentary podcasts chart, while Serial sits at No. 70 in our Top 100 and No. 10 among true crime shows.
Where to listen: METRO is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and, because the RSS feed is public, in any other app. No Times subscription is needed. If the schedule holds, episode 3 lands Thursday, November 5.
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