A little over two months ago, Sarah Koenig made an appearance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Questions about upcoming seasons of Serial inevitably came up. “I really miss the days when nobody gave a crap what I was doing,” New York magazine’s Vulture reported Koenig as saying in reply. “I wish I wasn’t worrying that sources were going to call somebody and be like, ‘Guess who I just talked to?’ It’d be nice to just be like a troll in my basement again.”

So much for that. Thursday’s launch of the second season of Serial, with Bowe Bergdahl, proved that Koenig may never be a basement troll again. The rollout was swift and smooth: just two hours after it launched, it was a trending topic on Twitter.

The New York Times and Vanity Fair had previews up instantly. This was quite different from last year, when Serial more slowly and steadily seared itself into public consciousness around the world.

There are a few reasons for that. The incredible success of the first season left everyone hungry for a second, so it’s understandable they’d want to be more prepared to manage the hype. And Bergdahl’s ongoing case is a major mainstream media story, so that explains the immediate interest. There is also a new factor in the equation: a Hollywood company called Page 1 Productions, run by the former journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, is working with Koenig and her team. Boal won an Oscar for screenplay writing in 2008 for The Hurt Locker. One might argue that the media blitz surrounding Serial’s second season feels more like publicity for a film than a work of journalism.

Boal’s company is backed by Annapurna Pictures, a production company headed by Megan Ellison. Boal, Ellison and the director Kathryn Bigelow were also the chief movers and drivers behind Zero Dark Thirty, the 2012 film about the capture of bin Laden. Zero Dark Thirty came under fire in part because of questions about its veracity. Some questioned its portrayal of the events, given that Boal was granted access to tell the “real story” by the CIA. Glenn Greenwald, then a Guardian columnist, questioned the film’s “glorification of torture” as the key to finding bin Laden.

Boal and Page 1 are also planning to make a movie out of Bergdahl’s story, following much the same procedure Boal did for The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, which raises a lot of questions about how closely journalism can – or should – ally itself with entertainment, especially considering that it was Boal who brought Koenig and her team the story. He interviewed Bergdahl for about 25 hours, over the phone and brought the tapes to Serial.

Screenwriter-turned-journalist Mark Boal. Photograph: Matt Sayles/AP

This leaves us wondering: how much of a wall is there between the movie and Serial? Does Boal count as one of the “journalists” here? There are important questions to ask about the relationship of entertainment to hard reporting, particularly on cases like the ones Serial picks. These are cases which speak to large societal issues: violence against women, anti-Muslim bigotry, the call of duty and the price of desertion. The Guardian reached out to Serial with specific questions about the nature of the arrangement with Page 1, including whether Bergdahl is being compensated for his involvement, but they declined to comment.

In a blogpost Thursday morning, Koenig described the nature of the partnership between Serial and Page 1 thusly:

They’d come to us, saying, hey, we’ve been doing all this reporting on the story, and we’ve also got this tape, do you think you might want to listen? And yes, we did, and we were kind of blown away. And so we began working with him.

Of the reporting process, she wrote:

They shared research with us, and also put us in touch with many of their sources, especially soldiers. We don’t have anything to do with their movie, but Mark and Page 1 are our partners for season 2. You might hear Mark and me talking from time to time over the course of the season, so we can compare notes.

To the New Yorker, both Boal and Koenig characterized the association as a tighter collaboration. His tapes with Bergdahl are the “heart of the project” but “both groups have done extensive additional reporting, independently and together. They share editorial decisions”. And obviously, while the Serial team may not be dictating the terms of the screenplay, the projects are undeniably linked.

The film’s marketing will, in part, depend on the plot having been ripped from the headlines. Serial’s involvement with the reporting will help enhance that brand.

It’s clever, actually, that it’s being done this way around: audiences of the film will arrive with a sense that they already know “the story”, because they learned all about it on Serial. The movie will be armed with the imprimatur of a trusted journalistic brand.

A user on Reddit may have been on to something (rare as that is for them) when they remarked on Thursday: “Initial impression: longest trailer for a movie ever made.”

We first learned that Bergdahl would be the subject of the second season in September, in an article published on, of all earthly places, the lad-mag Maxim’s website. The article was written by a journalist named Matthew Farrell. Farrell had once paired with investigative journalist Michael Hastings for Rolling Stone to write one of the first deeply reported stories about Bergdahl to appear in the press.

Farrell attributed his story on Serial’s involvement with the Bergdahl case to “anonymous sources”. But reading between the lines, it seemed that he had learned about Serial’s involvement with the case from the people he had himself interviewed for his Bergdahl article, including members of Bergdahl’s unit.

In fact, he interviewed them again for the Maxim article. One of them colourfully observed that “Serial is trying to make a nifty diorama for hipsters to marvel at”. Both were disdainful of “those looking to gain from Bergdahl’s story”.

Farrell failed to mention in the piece that his Rolling Stone article had in fact also been optioned for movie rights, by Fox Searchlight, according to Variety. So arguably he would be counted as among those standing to gain from Bergdahl’s story. (Fox Searchlight had not provided a comment as to the status of this project as of this morning.)

Or could have been, had Serial not appeared on the scene. When Bergdahl was released from captivity by the Taliban in May 2014, Page 1 began developing a project. To the New Yorker, Page 1 said it took them a couple of months to get to Bergdahl.

That was the last anyone heard about the Page 1-Bergdahl project until September, when Serial’s involvement was revealed. At the time, they were testy about having so much attention focussed on their reporting process. “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,” Serial’s publicity manager Emily Condon said at the time. “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.”

Condon may be right that it isn’t “menschy” to be inquiring about the nature of their reporting. But given Serial’s worldwide fame, and its prestige as a force in modern journalism – last year, it won a Peabody award – issues of transparency and objectivity aren’t irrelevant. We still have to ask.