Hugely popular podcast is attempting to solve case of soldier who allegedly deserted his post in Afghanistan and now faces life in prison - but there are much greater pitfalls this time around, say our panel of journalistic and military experts

On Wednesday, Maxim magazine broke the news that Serial’s second season will probably take on the mystery of Bowe Bergdahl, the army sergeant who left his base in Afghanistan under mysterious circumstances and was then captured by the Taliban. In 2014, he was recovered by the US government in a swap for five Guantánamo Bay prisoners and charged with desertion. He currently faces life imprisonment.

Serial, the podcast made by This American Life, which became hugely popular last year, will attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery of his desertion. Here, a panel of experts judge how well the Serial treatment will fit this most contentious of cases.

Serial podcast: is Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl their next investigation? Read more

Richard Allen Smith: the military will be reluctant to engage

In 2007, while I was serving with the 82nd Airborne Division at Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, veteran reporter Lara Logan arrived to our unit for a short embed. I don’t remember much about her being there other than her briefly checking in at the personnel tent. If you search her reporting during that summer, you won’t find any quotes from anyone belonging to my unit. The one strong memory I have about her presence is an overwhelming sentiment among my comrades that fell somewhere between scepticism and annoyance.

Bowe Bergdahl’s story is compelling. It combines politics, patriotism, war, struggle and international intrigue. But listeners followed every moment of Sarah Koenig’s first season of Serial partially because it showed the view of the case from nearly every possible point of view (except that of Jay, but even that was later provided to the Intercept). Military communities, though, are inherently insular and many troops are reluctant to engage with the civilian world, let alone media publicity. Without a wealth of cooperation from members of Bergdahl’s unit (which Matt Farwell has already reported is hard to come by), I can’t imagine Koenig having enough source material to fill a compelling season of Serial. I assume Bergdahl and his attorneys are cooperating. There are also primary source documents from WikiLeaks. But other than Bergdahl himself (who I’m inclined to believe), the story will lack comprehensive accounts from the only other parties who were there for this ordeal: his fellow soldiers and his captors. Telling the story that way may convey truth. But making that truth interesting will be difficult.

Richard Allen Smith is a writer and Afghanistan war veteran

Paul Lewis: this time, the podcast has competition

On one level, this makes sense. Koenig is taking the model that worked so well on the virtually unknown murder in Baltimore and applying it to a far more high-profile case – one that Americans are already gripped by. If the case of Bergdahl turns out to be the focus of the next Serial, and Koenig and her team can unearth something that we didn’t already know – the true litmus test for this kind of journalism – this could be another big win. But there’s no doubt This American Life is taking a gamble.

Listeners to the first series kept tuning in precisely because they knew nothing about the curious and long-forgotten murder of schoolgirl Hae Min Lee in 1999. That won’t be the case for Bergdahl, who is about to be made even more famous by a trial that will receive wall-to-wall coverage. Adnan Syed was desperate to tell his story to Koenig. This time round, the competition – for sources, leads, interviews and audience attention span – will be fierce.

The first Serial worked because it did something novel: giving audiences a taste of the process of investigative reporting. Digging, as those in the trade call it, can be an exhilarating journalistic rollercoaster of twists, turns, frustrations, dead ends and occasional breakthroughs. The problem – as listeners to the first Serial discovered – is that the ride doesn’t always culminate in a revelatory scoop. Fans (like me) didn’t care about that because it was the incremental ups and downs of the investigation that made Serial so addictive. It was the journey that counted, not the destination. Koenig will find it hard to take her audience on similar voyage of discovery if they already know the Bergdahl plot, including how it ends.

Paul Lewis is west coast bureau chief of Guardian US

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Taliban propaganda video released on Christmas Day 2009 showing a captured Bowe Bergdahl. Photograph: AP

Nate Bethea: can’t they wait until the trial is complete?

I have no qualms about Serial providing an in-depth take on the Bergdahl story. There’s plenty more to discover; I’ve learned new details (and corrected old ones) since I first wrote on this topic last June. However, there is a question of timing: why can’t it wait until the trial is complete? For the veterans of 1st Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, this has been a six-year ordeal that is fundamentally not yet finished. Until it reaches its conclusion, I am quite frankly wary of any interference, no matter how well-intentioned. Serial’s first season addressed a closed case that was many years old. This case is not, and the resolution of this case will mark a significant milestone for all of us veterans trying to get on with our lives.

Another topic that concerns me is the tendency of the US government to leak classified information strategically when they believe it will shape public opinion in its favour. I don’t know what sorts of insider access Serial has received, but if they possess any classified information, they should think long and hard about how its release might affect this case. I’d love to know the whole, unvarnished truth – but not to the detriment of Bergdahl receiving due process.

Nathan Bradley Bethea served as an infantry officer in the same unit as Bergdahl

Michelle Dean: will the show’s collage approach work in this case?

Serial takes its method, consciously or not – I could never tell – from an approach to literary journalism best practiced by Janet Malcolm. I once heard a journalism professor describe the narrative arc of Malcolm’s work as: “Here, watch me report this.” Like her, Koenig doesn’t give us her conclusions, and then justify them by reference to her interviews, as a more traditional investigative journalist would. Instead, she takes us along to meet people and hear the competing testimony ourselves.

The approach is most effective when applied to a story that takes us into the depths of uncertainty. People wanted Koenig to solve Adnan Syed’s case, and I don’t doubt that she did hope for a clearer ending. But if she had known, from the beginning, what she thought of the case and more importantly of Syed, the podcast would have sounded, I think, totally different. It would have had a clearer beginning, middle and end. It also would have provided less fodder for the rampant speculation that took over the internet last fall.

The Bergdahl case fits the uncertainty paradigm pretty well. Michael Hastings’ 2012 Rolling Stone article on Bergdahl definitely describes a situation about which there are few, if any, clear answers. But if I think the material could be good, I’m not totally sure about the execution. The original season was almost deliberately haphazard, a slow burn fanned by obsessives on the internet. It grew into something that, taking their word for it, Serial’s producers never expected. Which one guesses, is still the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants strategy they will follow in any season two.

Michelle Dean is books editor of Guardian US

Raf Noboa y Rivera: they must be wary of valorising Bergdahl

Bergdahl’s story is well-suited to Serial’s format, given the relative mystery of how he wound up a prisoner of the Taliban, and what role he played in that, if any.

Some members of Bergdahl’s unit have expressed their scepticism about Serial’s involvement. They believe Sarah Koenig and Serial’s producers will paint the military in a negative light, and are biased in favour of Bergdahl. I’m not as sceptical. I think Serial can play a constructive role here, particularly in how someone with Bergdahl’s background joins the army and fights in a war as complex as this one. But Serial will have to be careful not to treat Bergdahl uncritically, let alone as the “hero” of its story, as it did with Adnan Syed. Bergdahl admits that he walked away intentionally from his brothers in arms, in order to inform the world of the ghastly conditions in his unit.

In combat, all we have is each other. To have someone walk away, even if it’s with the best of intentions, is a betrayal, even if it doesn’t rise to treason. I think Serial needs to acknowledge this if it’s to have any credibility in exploring the various facets of this story. Otherwise, it will have failed in its greatest duty of all: to the truth.

Raf Noboa y Rivera is a writer and US army veteran