Privilege, boredom and murder set against the southern gothic backdrop of rural Alabama are the elements of the latest and hotly anticipated podcast series, S-Town.

It is from the makers of Serial, which launched as a spinoff of This American Life and became the cultural phenomenon of 2014 when Sarah Koenig, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, spent more than a year reinvestigating the murder in 1999 of an 18-year-old high school student, Hae Min Lee, and the circumstances that led to the arrest of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed.

Season two, which was less well received, told the story of Bowe Bergdahl, the US soldier who left his post in Afghanistan in 2009, then was captured and held by the Taliban for five years and later charged as a deserter.

The first Serial was downloaded more than 250 million times, won several journalism awards and helped to kickstart the podcast phenomenon that is becoming a key part of a reporter’s craft.

The success places high expectations on the new series, which begins next week. It was conceived after a podcast listener, named John, asked the producer of This American Life, Brian Reed, to investigate the son of a wealthy family in his Alabama town who had allegedly been bragging that he had got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, triggering a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.

Last week Alabama newspapers speculated on which unsolved murder case Serial might be following. Certainly there is no shortage to choose from – in Jefferson County alone, home to the city of Birmingham, there are literally hundreds. The media looked at towns beginning with S, though it may as well be for shit as any place name.

It could be the case of Linda Offord, a mother of three working the night shift at a convenience store in Sylacauga who was murdered in November 1987. William “Billy” Kuenzel is on death row for the killing. But his conviction is widely considered suspect, since it was obtained almost exclusively on the testimony of one man, who then received a reduced sentence. But none of the cases fits the producers’ descriptions of S-Town.

Bill Rankin, a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, produced his own Serial-esque murder podcast in 2015. Titled Breakdown, it followed the case of Justin Chapman, a teenager from the small Georgia town of Bremen who was found guilty of setting fire to his home in 2006 to get back at his landlord, killing his 79-year-old neighbour.

Bowe Bergdahl was held by the Taliban for five years. On his release he was charged with desertion. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The case was fraught with problems and became the basis of Rankin’s seven-part series that persuaded the authorities to reopen the case. In 2015 Chapman’s convictions for murder and arson were thrown out.

Rankin says the response he received for the podcast far exceeded anything he had received for a written story. Listening to courtroom testimony or the sound of a locomotive moving through town is far more intimate than a newspaper story could ever be, he points out.

Rankin’s podcast raises the question of whether the southern states, in the tradition of writers like William Faulkner, are especially rich territory for elaborate, unsolved cases, or if the widespread failures of the criminal justice system are behind the volume of potential stories.

“The Justin Chapman case showed there were breakdowns in the public defender system in Georgia that were epidemic, but those breakdowns happen all across the country,” he says. But Rankin does allow that, for the purposes of podcasts, the south is superior because of the accents.

Kara Swisher, co-founder of the technology website Recode, says the podcast medium is highly adaptable to both long-form storytelling and straightforward news reporting. “They give you a chance to be more substantive and deliver information in a way that’s compelling and convenient.”

It is also potentially remunerative. According to one recent study, nearly one in five Americans aged 18 to 49 report listening to podcasts at least once a month, while nearly one in three men aged 18 to 34 do so. They are also likely to be decent earners and have a university degree. “It’s all part of journalism, it’s just a question of reaching the reader where they want to be reached,” says Swisher. “Podcasts are the perfect format for creating a sense of anticipation. It hasn’t gone away in this twitchy world that people love a great story and they’re willing to experiment.”

Last week, at the media confab South-by-Southwest, Swisher talked with the actor and Jungle Book director Jon Favreau and four former White House staffers about their popular political podcast Pod Save America.

On the subject list: speculation that the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, may run for president. “It’s about the personality, it’s not about the résumé,” said Favreau. “If there is a tech leader who goes out there and has a no-bullshit conversation with the American people about what we need to do, then, yeah, maybe they have a shot.”

Does that compete with a southern gothic murder? The 3.3 billion podcast downloads in 2015 prove that in this fast-growing medium, anything is possible, says Swisher. There are no rules to it, “but we just don’t want to get it to get too formulaic”.

We may learn the answer on 28 March when the complete episode list of S-Town is released. In a three-minute preview, the producers set a trail of clues involving the maintenance of antique clocks and the “witness marks” that provide hints – and false clues – about how to keep them going long after the people who made them are dead …