Best Buy quickly backtracks on Twitter ‘Serial’ joke
The brand’s account referenced a seemingly nonexistent pay phone that became part of the prosecution’s case in the murder trial of Adnan Syed.
“Serial,” a true-crime podcast from the producers of “This American Life,” is an absolute phenomenon.
It has been the top podcast on iTunes for weeks, and with the final episode of its first “season” coming next week, its fans are even more feverish for it. That’s likely what led the social media managers at Best Buy to tweet a joke about the show Thursday. They quickly discovered it was a mistake.
“Serial” has spent 11 weeks reinvestigating the 1999 murder of Baltimore teenager Hae Min Lee, for which her ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was convicted. Much of the prosecution’s case rested on the testimony and timeline of Jay, an informant who said he helped bury the body.
A sticky detail in Jay’s testimony involves a pay phone at a Baltimore-area Best Buy. There isn’t one there now, and according to quite a few locals to whom host Sarah Koenig spoke, there never has been.
That’s a lot of necessary background to explain a 10-word (and one hashtag) tweet, but the many fans of the podcast knew what the tweet was about immediately and were not pleased that the electronics chain was seemingly poking fun at a real-life murder case.
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