Serial podcast to return with a 2nd and 3rd season starting this fall

Serial junkies, get out your sleuthing kits again. The wildly popular podcast is coming back with two new series.

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In an email sent to Serial newsletter subscribers on Wednesday, producers said they hope to launch Season Two this fall and Season Three next spring.

"We are hard at work reporting not one, but two distinct new stories," they say. "And we hope it means we can reduce the amount of time between the end of Season Two and the beginning of Season Three."

Planning for a second season was a slam dunk after a very successful launch in which Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder investigated the true-crime case of Adnan Syed, a young man imprisoned for life for killing an ex-girlfriend.

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Listeners wil have to wait to find out which cases the producers have chosen to further investigate.

"What we can say is that they're very different from Season One, but no less interesting to us," they say.

The podcast is a co-production of Chicago Public Radio's WBEZ and This American Life.