The 25-year-old Brit breaking podcast records
Hit podcast ‘Serial’ is more than just a true crime show, its new British star Emmanuel Dzotsi tells Charlotte Lytton
FEATURE
It was the groundbreaking podcast that launched a true crime phenomenon; the record-smashing series that has been beamed through the ears of hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide. Yet the makers of Serial – including 25-year-old Emmanuel Dzotsi, its new British co-presenter – “don’t really see ourselves as a true crime show”.
That’s not a dig at the likes of Making a Murderer or The Jinx and S-town, OJ: Made in America, Wild Wild Country, The Keepers or I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, he says of the tidal wave of TV documentaries, podcasts and books that have followed since Serial’s first season aired in 2014. Focused on the seemingly shaky conviction of teenager Adnan Syed for murdering his high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee – it fast became a cult hit.
Instead, for Dzotsi and coproducers Sarah Koenig, Julie Snyder and Ira Glass, the concern is “the way in which our system works, and the way we are responsible for that”.
It is the question that underpins the podcast’s third series, now at its midway point and – in the vein of everything Koenig and co do – racking up milestones along the way (the first two episodes were downloaded three million times on the day of release; the first two series have been cumulatively downloaded more than 350 million times).
Instead of focusing on a single case, as in the first two series, the new episodes chart the infractions at a courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, a city in which the crime rate is 145 per cent higher than the national average. The show explores a variety of different stories, sometimes in self-contained episodes, while others stretch across several. The product of a year-long piece of reportage – observing judges and juries, innocents and convicts – its goal was to move away from the “extraordinary” cases explored in Serial’s first two outings and transition, instead, to the ordinary.
That “ordinary” runs the full gamut from straightforward traffic violations to the murder of a five-month-old baby; of police brutality to bar fights. The reaction, thus far, has been “overwhelming at times”, says
Dzotsi – both for him as a fledgling presenter, and those who have suddenly found their tales of hell and heartbreak scrutinised on a global stage. “It’s a big thing to be on a podcast like this; to be a regular person out in the world minding your own business, and have a bunch of people on the internet talking about you. That’s crazy,” he muses from his home in New York, where he recently returned after the eight months he spent reporting in Ohio.
The producers go to great lengths to prepare those involved, and do their best to handle any concerns in the aftermath. During the course of our conversation, Dzotsi is called three times by a person featured in one episode; on a train earlier in the week, as Dzotsi shouted over the clanking rails to allay the concerns of another subject who had phoned up, he was shushed by a woman, angry she wasn’t able to hear the latest episode of Serial as a result of the conversation.
That irate commuter, evidently, was unaware that Dzotsi was broadcasting on either end of her headphones; being “podcast recognisable” is something that the reporter himself is still wrestling with.
Born in Streatham, south London, Dzotsi and his family first traded the capital for Shropshire, before moving to Belgium in 2000 and settling in Toledo, Ohio, five years later. This peripatetic upbringing, as well as having a Ghanaian father and Dominican mother, has given him, “all these different identities. I’m a black person, I’m an English person, I’m a child of the Caribbean, of Ghana, of Toledo, of the United States,” he says, “and I think all of those things can exist at the same time.”
As a result, Dzotsi finds himself concerned with political turmoil on either side of the Atlantic. “I didn’t think I would see so many of the same arguments that are happening in the US, happening in the UK. And actually everywhere,” he says. “It feels like the whole world is having this conversation about immigration and re-evaluating what it means to be a citizen; to belong to somewhere.”
Dzotsi’s has been a relatively rapid rise. After graduating from Ohio State University, he joined WBEZ Chicago, the public radio station that produces Serial, as an intern, later becoming a production assistant, before moving to sister programme This American Life. Six months later, he landed his new gig. His attempts to find his place in the world, after bouncing between continents, is diametrically opposed to most of the people he met in Cleveland, while recording Serial. Many of those featured have spent their lives on a conveyor belt of the city’s police cells, courtrooms and prisons; to them, he is acutely aware, he is an unknown quantity.
“There were tons of times, when I was interviewing people, that I could tell they were suspicious of me,” Dzotsi says. “I know what it means to be a black man in America; I know my heritage, that I’m a descendant of slaves,” he continues. But it is another thing entirely “to go into a courthouse and watch people who look like you – who are you, but for circumstance – be put into shackles”.
The mental toll of those eight months in Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas will never leave him, Dzotsi adds, “in ways both
‘It feels like everyone is re-evaluating what it means to belong somewhere’
good and bad”. There is something unshakeable, he explains, “every single time, whether you think the person did it or not, about watching someone lose their liberty”.
He’s dealt with the most harrowing cases just as any reporter-turned“podcast recognisable” person might: talking about it – through exchanges with his editor, Snyder, his friends or parents, the latter of whom are now keen listeners, and quick to offer feedback that usually begins, “you were really great, but…”
Whether he asks for their advice or not, criticism is, he knows, crucial. In particular, he clings to advice given to him in childhood by his grandfather, who left his career as a teacher in Dominica for England, where he spent the rest of his working days doing manual labour. “I remember him saying, ‘Emmanuel, it’s all about the work. If you’re lucky to do something you love that’s great, but even if you’re in a place you don’t want to be, find the things in your work that are meaningful to you.’
“‘Attack that,’ he said, ‘and the rest will fall into place.’”