For the past several weeks, Thursday mornings have taken on a special meaning for hundreds of thousands of curious souls around the world. That’s when the makers of the podcast Serial release the latest installment of the weekly show. You’ll know the new one has arrived when your Twitter timeline begins to look like a Serial word cloud. The true crime narrative show debuted earlier this fall to instant acclaim, and it has only gained in popularity each week–taking the top spot on iTunes, inspiring memes and Reddit sleuthing , and spawning bookshop listening parties and the like. While the subject of Serial is indeed a juicy whodunit, there’s no mystery about just why people are mainlining episodes with such rabid intensity: this is seriously compelling storytelling.

The podcast is the brainchild of This American Life producers Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, who have been working together for 12 years. The two recently decided to experiment with the long-haul format of unspooling one story over the course of an entire season. It just so happens that the story they selected is especially conducive to incremental progression. The inaugural season of Serial centers on the case of Adnan Syed, convicted in 1999 at age 17 of killing his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee, despite the lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime. Syed has always maintained his innocence, and over the past year, Koenig has investigated whether perhaps he’s been telling the truth.

Julie Snyder Photo: Meredith Heuer, courtesy of Serial

In a world full of impatient entertainment junkies used to binging through entire TV series during hazardously sedentary weekends, Serial is a wistful throwback to an age of cultivated anticipation. The show leaves its audience wanting more each week, not with cliffhangers, but by stoking the hunger for closure with every new wrinkle in the case. Hijacking a global audience’s rapt interest each week is an enviable skill, no matter how inherently absorbing the subject. Co.Create recently spoke with Serial’s Julie Snyder to get to the bottom of hers and Koenig’s approach to telling a story.

In beginning to unpack all the details of Syed’s case, Snyder and Koenig had to find a way to bring listeners up to speed without overburdening them.

Hae Min Lee

“We started with sort of a typical outline: ‘Here’s the story. Here’s what’s interesting about the story. Here are the things that look fishy,'” Snyder says. “That’s about the point when you add, ‘But on the other hand…’ So it’s sort of the natural progression of how you would tell any story. If you’re going to say, ‘Here’s what’s interesting about the story,’ you have to explain the case, you have to explain who the characters are, at least somewhat explain motivations, and then obviously you have to address the question that was brought to Sarah, and the reason she started looking into it: whether what they said happened in the trial is what really happened.”

It’s difficult to tell a story when there are so many details, and for Snyder and Koenig, a big part of that challenge lay in just conveying enough of the case’s key facts without losing listener interest. “We have an insider’s knowledge of what pieces of evidence we have and where they’re going, and that part of the story takes place inside the details. In order to bring anybody in on what we found so interesting, there’s a lot you have to understand first. It’s sort of a challenge. I’d say for at least the first five episodes, there had to be some housekeeping being done, and it was essentially trying to figure out how much was too much before someone was just going to cry uncle and say ‘I don’t care any more, this just feels like somebody’s telling me the most minute details about their dream.’

One of the ways Serial hooks listeners in is by mentioning some facts of the case in passing, while assuring that they will become important later on.