![]() Serial begins its third season with considerable baggage. After all, issues aren’t always defined by their edge cases, in much the same way that people aren’t always defined by their highest of highs or lowest of lows. But while those stories are usually attention-grabbing, anger-provoking, and painfully salacious, there may well be distinct limits to what they actually tell us about the criminal justice system. ![]() ![]() ![]() In The Dark’s second seasonis a representative example of this, as its case revolved around a black man in Mississippi who was tried six times by the same white attorney for a crime he might not have committed. (Of course, the question of who constitutes the “we” is always and rightfully a subject of debate, meditation, and criticism.) But the most noteworthy of these works tend to deal with extraordinary cases in order to bring attention to the strangeness and the failures of the systems that are meant to support us. These works find value in mining the gap between how the world works and how we think it works - or rather, how we think it should work. The surreality is often key to crime journalism, novels, documentaries, podcasts, and legal dramas like The Good Fight.
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