Another Serial Productions podcast. It’s fun to think back to 2014, to that first season of Serial, where one of the key ideas of it was that it was both a self-contained story but also open-ended - it would run for as many episodes as Sarah Koenig needed to tell it. 9 years later, even if not bound by the typical 13 episode orders of a TV show, it’s interesting to see that all these podcasts now seem to be finished before they launch. There’s a certain lack of potential there. I don’t know. It’s hard not to think of the patterns, the trends, the tropes. The Improvement Association - whilst thought-provoking and well told - does hit a few of them, especially that now hoary old thing of “this one very local thing actually explains a whole lot of the wider world, if you think about it”. Examining the world of local politics in a county of North Carolina, The Improvement Association spokes out to voter fraud, absentee ballots, racism, regressive taxation, voter intimidation, and then slightly on the nose brings Eric Trump into it. The freewheeling nature is enjoyable, but it lacks a narrative cohesion that is implied by its limited season format.