Serial

Serial may refer to the presentation of works in sequential segments, e.g.:

Serial may also refer to:

Art, entertainment, and media

Computing and technology

Serial (podcast)

Serial is a podcast produced by Sarah Koenig, first released in October 2014 as a spin-off of the radio program This American Life. Using investigative journalism, Koenig narrates a nonfiction story over multiple episodes. Episodes vary in length. New episodes were originally available weekly, but partway through the second season the schedule was revised to every other week. Serial ranked number one on iTunes even before its debut and remained there for several weeks.Serial won a Peabody Award in April 2015 for its innovative telling of a long-form nonfiction story.

The series was co-created and is co-produced by Koenig and Julie Snyder, both producers of This American Life.

Serial has been confirmed for two more seasons. The first episode of season two of Serial was released December 10, 2015, and season three will be released in the spring of 2016.

Series overview

Koenig has said that Serial is "about the basics: love and death and justice and truth. All these big, big things." She also has noted, "this is not an original idea. Maybe in podcast form it is, and trying to do it as a documentary story is really, really hard. But trying to do it as a serial, this is as old as Dickens." Episodes are released on Thursdays.

Serial film

A movie serial, film serial or chapter play, was a short subject originally shown in movie theaters in conjunction with a feature film, and derived from pulp magazine serialized fiction. Also known as "chapter plays," they were extended motion pictures broken into a number of segments or parts.

Each chapter was screened at a movie theater for one week, and ended with a cliffhanger, in which characters found themselves in perilous situations with little apparent chance of escape. Viewers had to return each week to see the cliffhangers resolved and to follow the continuing story. Movie serials were especially popular with children, and for many youths in the first half of the 20th century a typical Saturday at the movies included at least one chapter of a serial, along with animated cartoons, newsreels, and two feature films.

Popularity and decline

Many serials were Westerns, since those were the least expensive to film. Besides Westerns, though, there were films covering many genres, including crime fiction, espionage, comic book or comic strip characters, science fiction, and jungle adventures. Although most serials were filmed economically, some were made at significant expense. The Flash Gordon serial and its sequels, for instance, were major productions in their times.