The true story of New Order’s rise from the ashes of Joy Division

Transmissions, which plots the story of Joy Division and New Order, returns for a second run. Plus: five of the best sci-fi podcasts

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In case you missed it, Serial’s Sarah Koenig was recently interviewed by Fiona Sturges for the Guardian, on 10 years of Serial. It was an intriguing interview about how web sleuths had changed Koenig’s own view of the Adnan Syed case that made her podcast such a huge hit back in 2014. But one section struck me as pretty surprising, if not totally shocking. Good friends and family, Koenig said – “like, even my siblings” – had asked her whether its fourth series, on Guantánamo Bay, had been released yet (it came out in March). “We can speculate about the topic and the quality of it, but I think it’s also just the [pod] universe is completely different,” she added. “There are so many choices. We are in a sea of podcasts.”

Serial season four isn’t a whodunnit – Serial hasn’t really done that since its inception, and that first series that hinged on whether Syed had killed his high-school sweetheart Hae Min Lee. Successive outings have also leaned less on the serialisation you might assume from the title, with the Guantánamo series focusing instead on somewhat interlinked stories of life at the notorious US prison camp, rather than one overarching, unfurling narrative. In many ways, it’s kind of become a podcast Ship of Theseus, its elements slowly changing with each season. Still, it’s slightly sad to think that some people may have abandoned it just because it isn’t that same show it was at that very specific moment in time, pre-true crime boom, rather than something that has changed and evolved over a decade. Plus, the Guantánamo series is pretty solid (although, beware – episode eight in particular comes with some deeply upsetting details of sexual assault).