“Serial” is back. The 2014 podcast that launched 1,000 armchair murder detectives will return for another round with the criminal justice system on Sept. 20. The first season of the show took on a highly specific task: It sought to determine whether the Baltimore high school student Adnan Syed really killed his ex-girlfriend in 1999, or if the state of Maryland had convicted the wrong guy. The new season is going wider: It will take on, as a news release puts it, “the whole criminal justice system.”

Well: a slice of it anyway, as told through a year in the criminal courts of Cleveland, Ohio. “Serial” host Sarah Koenig has teamed up with the reporter Emmanuel Dzotsi, another “This American Life” alum, for a season that will tell the stories of multiple cases coursing through that system.

[Read about the podcast network that has become a hit with its pulp nonfiction stories.]

By broadening its range, “Serial” is in fact smartly narrowing its ambitions. Solving a murder is actually quite a lift, especially if you’re trying to do it years later and without the power of the police. The first season of “Serial” naïvely launched before having resolved its central mystery — hoping, perhaps, that listeners would call in with the clues to unlock it in time for the taping of its final episodes — and it ended with an unsatisfying shrug. But “the whole criminal justice system” has obvious, readably demonstrable problems that can be teased out through any number of case studies.

What remains to be seen is whether “Serial” can reanimate its rabid fan base without dangling the mysterious murder of a teenage girl alongside its examination of judicial wrongs. (A second season of the show, which took a detour from the civilian justice system and instead told the story of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier charged with desertion, failed to make much of a cultural impact.)