'Serial' is an utterly riveting podcast - just watch out for bedsores

I'm cheating a bit this week, because I'm not going to write about a TV show - or anything you can watch, in fact. Instead, I'd like to discuss something you can listen to: a series of US-produced podcasts called, rather unimaginatively, 'Serial', writes Rebecca Davies

Serial is brought to us by the same people who make the excellent podcast This American Life, described as a "weekly radio show on topics that aren't really news, but that relate to everyone's life".

This American Life has a devoted following, but my major issue with podcasts in the past has been that I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do while you listen to them. They hark back to the glory days of radio dramas, when families would huddle around a wireless and listen, enthralled, while a story unfolded. The most famous example was the radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, about an alien invasion, which caused widespread panic when it was broadcast in 1938 because listeners allegedly thought that they were listening to a real news bulletin.

But that was back in the day when radio listening was an event in itself. In our ADHD modern reality, it seems profoundly archaic to think about just sitting and listening to something without doing anything else. Hence my confusion about podcasts: they clearly demand too much of your attention for you to be able to carry out a meaningful task and still focus on the content.

People say podcasts are great to listen to while you're cooking, but I never undertake anything in a kitchen that takes longer than five minutes, so that doesn't work for me. If you download them on to your phone or iPod, I imagine they're great for whiling away time in traffic, as long as you're confident about your route. Because Serial is gripping.

Serial has proved to me that binge-listening can be a real thing.

On an idle Saturday morning, I listened to the first episode while lying in bed - you can play them straight from the website serialpodcast.org - and then listened to the next one. And the next one. And the next one. When I thought I was in danger of developing bedsores, I desperately sought out trivial household chores to do so that I could justify continuing to listen. Eight episodes later, I only stopped because I thought if I finished them all in one go I would have no reason to live.

Serial tells the true story of a perplexing crime committed in 1999: the murder of Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school student in Baltimore. Her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted of strangling her and is currently serving a life term in prison. But did he do it? This is what the producers are trying to determine.

Journalist Sarah Koenig, who has a great radio voice, presents the show. A new episode is released weekly. Her research appears to be playing out at least partly in real time: we explore the case with her. Regular listeners have become obsessive, with whole websites dedicated to discussing it. This has led to some problematic real-life consequences, because the people involved in the case (most of whom are now in their early 30s) have social media accounts which are apparently not difficult to track down.

We don't know how many episodes the series will have - they say simply that they'll stay with the story "for as long as it takes to get to the bottom of it". I sort of hope it never ends. Serial is a killer.

Listen to episode 1, The Alibi: