Here's What The Second Season Of "Serial" Will Be About

Stock up on discount shrimp from The Crab Crib, because the second season of Serial is on the horizon!

After months of speculation and hand-wringing, the subject of Serial’s upcoming season has finally been revealed; first, weirdly, by Maxim, and later confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter.

Those hoping for another murder mystery, similar to Season 1’s investigation into the killing of student Hae Min Lee, might be disappointed, though Serial’s second go round will still undoubtedly inspire plenty of armchair sleuthing from listeners at home.

(In its first season, Serial became the fastest podcast to pass five million downloads and streams on iTunes, and garnered a ravenous following worldwide, especially on Reddit, where amateur detectives - perhaps irresponsibly - tried to solve the real-life murder themselves.)

Before reading the following, play this over the top:

(Spoiler alert, I suppose, for those who want to go into the podcast totally clean.)

Presenter Sarah Koenig will use the second season of her record-breaking podcast to deep dive into the case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Sgt. Bergdahl went missing from his Afghanistan army base in 2009 and was later captured by the Taliban. Five years later, he was recovered by the United States, traded for five Guantánamo Bay prisoners.

But it was out of the frying pan and into the fryer for Bergdahl, who was charged with desertion by the US military.

Koenig and one of Serial’s producers was spied at a preliminary hearing for Bergdahl just last week. (The hearing is to determine whether or not he should face a court-martial, and, ultimately, life in prison).

Apparently the screenwriter behind The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, Mark Boal, has been helping out the Serial team too, sharing his own research for another upcoming Kathryn Bigelow collaboration.

So there you go! Where – and why – did Bergdahl leave his post? Will Koenig and company have more luck getting to the bottom of this than they did with the guilt – or innocence - of Adnan Syed in Season 1? One thing’s for certain: the military are going to be a lot harder to interrogate than Jay was.

The public radio network that produces the podcast, NPR, released the following statement to Maxim about the next season. Ironically, they’re not super into the idea of nosy journalists poking around.

"We'd very much appreciate if fellow journalists would give us some room and not feel the need to attempt to dig into and try to figure out what you think we might be doing, especially since we're actively reporting stories, and having a bunch of wild speculation out there makes our job reporting harder. Doesn't feel very menschy. In any case, here's what I can tell you: The Serial staff is currently working on several things simultaneously: Season 2, Season 3, and some other podcast projects. For now we're not talking publicly about anything that we're working on."

For Season 3, can we recommend Serial figure out how exactly Maxim became a trailblazer in the realm of investigative journalism?