Austin Considine

He is also, thanks to his supporting role playing the sleazy Monroe Fuches on HBO’s dark comedy series “Barry,” an Emmy nominee.

In a TV and film career spanning more than three decades, Root, 67, has been one of Hollywood’s most prolific and versatile character actors, known for playing strange and memorable characters like Milton in “Office Space” and for his oddball roles in multiple Coen Brothers movies. His character in “Barry” is similarly singular: A kind of talent manager for an assassin (played by Bill Hader), Fuches is detestable and hilarious, pathetic and somehow lovable — despite making a living by having people murdered.

Fuches is also Root’s first regular role on a TV series since he played the eccentric billionaire Jimmy James in the ’90s NBC sitcom “NewsRadio.” In a sit-down interview last week at the historic Pete’s Tavern in downtown Manhattan, he said that the choice to avoid long-term TV gigs had been by design: Fighting typecasting, he simply hadn’t wanted “to be locked down.”

“I wanted it that way after ‘NewsRadio’ because all I was being offered at that point was sitcoms,” he said. “And you know, for somebody who came from Shakespeare and theater, it’s like, ‘Guys, I can do something else.’”

Over a pint of dark ale and a plate of coconut shrimp, Root talked about his first-time Emmy nomination — in a category that also includes the “Barry” actors Henry Winkler and Anthony Carrigan — and his opinions on what Fuches does in his spare time. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: When you first encountered the Fuches role, did it appear to have Emmy potential? Did it strike you as a role with that kind of heft and depth?

A: I can’t say that I ever think about it in terms of that. At my advanced age, if a script really grabs me and it’s involved with people that I admire and want to work with, then that’s it. But after the Emmy nomination, I had time to reflect on it, and I think it is the first meaty enough role where this could happen.

Q: I think some people assume that if you don’t have a regular TV role, you’re always looking for one.

Which is true. But after “NewsRadio” I decided to make a concerted effort to do hourlong dramas and to not be hooked up to a regular show, but to do recurring roles on them. So I ended up doing “West Wing” and “Justified” and “Boardwalk Empire” — all recurring roles — but they’re maybe half of the year out of a real schedule. Contractually, then you’re able to do other things: independent films, whatever comes up and fits your schedule. And that was more attractive to me than being hooked up to an hourlong drama.

Q: By then you must have been in a position where you felt you could actively make that decision.

A: I was in a place financially that I could pick and choose jobs. I wasn’t auditioning as much anymore. I would get calls from people and return-work from different directors — the Coen Brothers and other people — so that I had enough monetary safety to pick and choose quality work for hire.

Q: I heard in your recent interview with Marc Maron that Fuches sort of became more complex over time than he was when you first encountered him.

A: Very much so — a different character completely because we reshot the pilot with this character. I came in doing this for [the show’s creators] Bill [Hader] and Alec [Berg] as just a straight yelling bad guy: “You’re going to do this job, and dah dah dah.” And we shot that, and it was pretty funny. But HBO, Bill and Alec realized, you are starting at 10, and where are you going to go? We needed to start at two.

So they rewrote the character to be more of the bad uncle that you see now. It’s like, “Buddy, pal, you’ve got to go kill this guy. But he’s a bad guy, it’s OK. You don’t have to worry about it.” So we started from that premise, and then there was everywhere to go with it. By the end of the second season, we were able to really show his true colors — that he cares about no one but himself and everybody’s replaceable.

Q: Do you feel you’ve had some creative input with regard to that building process?

A: Yeah, I feel like I’ve got a lot of creative input. It’s like what we had on “NewsRadio” because we could rewrite dialogue on the floor. I can’t think of a time in the second season when we arrived on set and Bill or Alex didn’t go: “Nah, I don’t like any of this. What would you say here?” Which is hard for me because I didn’t come up from improv — they did.

That was a learning process for me, but a freeing one, because we couldn’t think about it. When you’re in a character, you should be able to think as that character and say whatever they would say. And the freedom to be able to do that is amazing and not normal. Normally things are very tightly scripted. “West Wing,” you didn’t change a word.

Q: How did you move from having a background in classic Shakespearean training into becoming a character actor on-screen?

A: I think they’re the same thing. I think Shakespeare is Commedia dell’arte. It’s characters, you know? And I would play a lot of the clowns and strange parts in comedies when I did Shakespeare. I don’t think that’s different, except archaic language-wise, from what you’re doing as a character actor now. So I’ve always characterized myself as a character actor. It’s not been my desire to go do Lear. I want to play the fool. To me, it’s a more interesting role.

Q: A lot of people probably imagine that character actors are just waiting around for that lead role.

A: Until one comes up. Yeah, that’s not the case, really, with a lot of character actors I know. They’re looking for interesting people to play. A lot of times, leads are … You’ve got a lot of lines, but they’re not very interesting. I’d rather play some kind of bent or strange human being than a guy who’s, you know, looking in the mirror.

Q: You said there was a time when you had to really fight against being typecast. Which character have you had to work hardest to shed?

A: Oh, it’s always Milton. And it’s funny to me because I was maybe 25 pounds heavier and I didn’t have a huge amount of screen time in that movie. But it’s the character that resonates with people, and I don’t resent it at all. I’m very happy that they got something out of it and they continue to see something new in it every generation. Because there are always going to be cubicle dwellers. There are always going to be people fighting with machines in the office. It’s always going to be a relevant thing with whatever the computers look like.

Q: We don’t get a lot of glimpses inside Fuches’ private life in “Barry.” What do you think he thinks about when he’s alone? What does he think of himself?

A: When he’s alone, he thinks about, “How can I make more money?” I think he’s one of those guys who is just a con man. I hope we can explore the inner Fuches in Season 3. I would love to see some backstory. I think he’s the kind of guy who was married for a second and then not married, and who has an ongoing relationship with a very blousy woman that we should see every once in a while. I would love for the show to be able to go into that interior world of his.

Q: If we got to know him better, it seems to me there’s probably some deep self-loathing in there.

A: Deep self-loathing and very, very deep psychological problems. [Laughs.] You do want to see a snippet of that so that you can have some sympathy for him at times — and you do because the writing is so good. You can see that he loves Barry, but he’ll drop him in a second.

This article originally appeared in

'Barry' Star Stephen Root Went From 'That Guy' to Emmy Nominee

You know Stephen Root. He’s that one guy. That actor who plays that weird dude in that one thing. Or, rather, more than 200 things. He’s the slob with the red stapler, the eccentric billionaire, the blind Mississippi DJ. He is a walking paradox: You know his face, but that’s largely because he has so effectively transformed himself over and over.

He just didn’t grasp the full horror while he lived it.

“For me, it was an amazing adventure, catching polliwogs in the creek and seeing them turn into frogs,” said Takei, 82, describing the three years — from ages 5 to 8 — he spent behind barbed wire in an Arkansas swamp. Never truly comprehending why he was there, he adapted, played with other children, adopted a stray dog.

Life was “butterflies and playing games,” he said. “I learned about the internment from my parents when I was a teenager.”

Takei’s family, he discovered, had been among the roughly 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans who were forcibly relocated to a World War II internment camp, the result of racist anti-espionage measures enacted by executive order after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Now, three-quarters of a century later, he has the chance to help bring that story to a wider audience with the AMC anthology series “The Terror,” which is returning on Aug. 12 with a story set mostly in a camp like the one that imprisoned him. It is a subject that has rarely been central to any major work on screen, let alone one with a distinctly Asian voice: Most of the cast is of Asian descent, as are the showrunner and two of the directors.

Takei, best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on “Star Trek,” is an actor on the show and a consultant, serving as a rare source of direct knowledge of what the camps were really like. On set, as he worked among the recreated barracks and guard towers, amid the mud and the tar paper, the memories welled up inside him. So, too, did an evident feeling of pride.

“This project is groundbreaking in that the story of the internment of Japanese-Americans is being told on this scale, this scope, for the first time” on TV, Takei said. “It’s massive, 10 hours, 10 episodes and in such depth — the characters are examined in depth.”

As Takei and others noted in several on-set interviews in May, the series, which infuses historical drama with supernatural horror, was a perfect vehicle for conveying such a dark historical chapter of prejudice and paranoia. It also seems fitting for a story that has stayed mostly in the shadows, with only a few major Hollywood exceptions — like “Snow Falling on Cedars” and “Come See the Paradise” — which had white male directors and leads.

Like the first season of “The Terror,” which followed a doomed 19th-century Arctic expedition, the second invites allegorical connections between its central menace and its historical circumstances. In Season 1, the colonialist British crew, led by an arrogant captain, is tormented by a monster after a crew member accidentally kills an Inuit shaman. Season 2, subtitled “Infamy,” is rooted in a folkloric tradition of Japanese ghost stories, known as kaidan; as the prisoners struggle against their captivity and spies in their own ranks, a vengeful ghost comes to camp, seeking justice for past transgressions.

The history, in other words, refuses to stay buried.

“The horror of the internment was harrowing,” said Takei, whose family was uprooted from its Los Angeles home and wound up living on that city’s skid row after the war. Fusing a story of injustice with a literary genre about justice-seeking demons was “an inspired combination,” he said.

“Imagine innocent people — I mean, everything taken from you, our home, our bank accounts, our business,” he added. “The stress was incredible.”

The production was as large in scale as it was in personal importance for Takei and others. For the four-month shoot, the producers assembled a cast of over 150, many of whom had relatives who had been interned. Every actor with a speaking role of a Japanese or Japanese-American person is of Japanese extraction.

“To me, it was really important, because the subject matter is so personal,” said the showrunner, Alexander Woo, himself Chinese-American. “This is a really special production for people who are deeply, deeply, personally invested. These are their families’ stories and, in the case of a couple of people, their own stories.”

The crew built elaborate period sets, including a partial re-creation of an internment camp, complete with barracks, mess hall, infirmary and stockade. Its 10 full-scale buildings, surrounded by guard towers and barbed wire, were outfitted with latrines, searchlights and military vehicles.

And, among those things, there are signs of stubborn resiliency and grace: community gardens, bamboo wind chimes, a birdhouse.

Takei, who still has vivid recollections of his camp, pointed to the crawl spaces underneath the reconstructed buildings as particularly evocative.

“We adopted a stray dog, and he was black, so we named him Blackie, and when something scary happened, he always crawled into the crawl space,” he said. “Those memories came back, seeing the barracks and the tar paper and the strips of wood that kept it attached. It was like I had gone back to Arkansas.”

Takei, who plays a community elder in the series, also hasn’t forgotten the “terrifying” day the soldiers came to drag his family from its home.

He remembers the fear that shook him and his younger brother, the cries of his baby sister. The soldiers marching up the driveway, bayonets on their rifles; the house that seemed to shake as their fists pounded the door. He remembers being marched outside with his brother, holding what few small packages they could carry. Their father carried two small suitcases, the maximum allowed per person.

“We followed him out onto the driveway and waited until my mother could come out,” Takei said. “And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm and a huge, heavy duffel bag on the other, and tears were streaming down her face. That memory is seared into my brain.”

Takei’s comments underscore a somewhat complicated aspect of the series. At a time when Asian-Americans are finally getting some authentic on-screen representation — more “Fresh Off the Boat” than Mickey Rooney — a truthful depiction of internment on this scale seems overdue. And yet it also resurrects a very painful story that many who lived through it were anxious to forget.

“A lot of that generation didn’t talk about it — it was a shameful period in their life,” said Derek Mio, who plays Chester, an American-born college student from Terminal Island, near Long Beach, California, who is forced into a camp with his family and pregnant girlfriend. Mio’s connection to the story was personal, his own grandfather and great-grandfather having lived on Terminal Island when the war began. They, too, had been hauled away to a camp.

“Growing up, I had just kind of heard here and there that our family had some history with the internment camps, but it wasn’t like they were needing to sit down and spill everything about it,” Mio said. “You’re treated inhumanely, and you’re crowded in these tight corners. You have to share the latrine, and it’s just … it’s not something you brag about.”

Woo, the showrunner, said he had wanted to offer a picture of the camps that captured that complexity — both the suffering and the dignity.

“There was extraordinary resilience in the over 100,000 people who were interned,” he said. “It was important to show the entire spectrum of experiences of the people in these camps and not convey it as a place of just monolithic misery.”

The show’s kaidan elements — which Woo described as “creepy stories of the supernatural that often are hundreds or even thousands of years old” — manifest in the Season 2 premiere as a kind of supernatural vigilantism. An abusive husband is blinded after his wife kills herself. A blackmailing lowlife finds his comeuppance at the bottom of the harbor. The moral balance is righted.

The horror elements, Woo noted, are designed to deepen viewers’ connection to the prisoners’ terror.

“If you want to convey a visceral feeling, horror’s a terrific way of doing it,” he said.

The internment story is ultimately an immigrant story, Woo said, one he hoped all Americans, many of whose ancestors faced discrimination, could identify with. Cristina Rodlo, who plays Chester’s Hispanic girlfriend, is the only series lead not of Asian descent. And yet, as a Mexican actress working in Los Angeles on a visa, she said that a story about detained immigrant families resonated with her as well.

“For us, Mexicans, we’re living it right now — it’s just the same story over and over again,” she said. “It’s insane that we did this 70 years ago, and we haven’t learned anything from history.”

For his part, Takei has made it his “mission in life” to educate people about the camps. He described being active in the civil rights movement and shaking hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (“For about five days after that, this hand didn’t get washed,” he said with a laugh.) In 1981, he testified before Congress about the effects of internment on Japanese-Americans. He helped found the Japanese American National Museum, in Los Angeles, so that “when we die off, we didn’t want the story of our imprisonment to die off.”

And then there was Takei’s role as Sulu, a groundbreaking one in the history of Asian representation. In some ways, Woo sees this season of “The Terror” as “a gift to George,” he said, recognizing “what he meant to me and to a whole generation of Asian-American creatives.”

“I’ve often felt a lot of this is to sort of honor what he has considered to be his life’s work,” Woo added. “If I’m going to get a chance to work with one of my heroes, I want to offer my thanks and gratitude.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/arts/television/the-terror-george-takei.html" id="f7849b5b-c6b3-309a-ac88-b182f232fbdb">The New York Times</a>.

'The Terror' Summons the Ghosts of a Real-Life Horror Story

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The best horror stories tell us something about ourselves. A zombie horde stands in for toxic conformity, a monster for unconquerable grief. But not every scary story is an allegory. One of the scariest the actor George Takei ever heard was a true one about his own life.

On March 7, the debut of Amy Berg’s four-part documentary series for HBO, “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” was three days away, and many signs indicated that a new trial for Syed was coming: His conviction had been vacated; two courts had agreed that a new trial was needed; and Berg’s documentary promised to raise even more questions about the credibility of the prosecution’s case.

Then March 8, the highest court in Maryland overturned the lower courts’ decisions, reinstating Syed’s conviction. Berg suddenly found that her series would be airing in a starkly different context.

“I find the decision disappointing considering all the troubling and lingering questions surrounding this case that we explored while filming,” she said in a statement given to The Times.

The final part of Berg’s documentary is set to air Sunday, putting a bow on revelations that HBO has called “groundbreaking.” In a phone conversation that took place before the higher court’s ruling, Berg spoke about her hopes and motivations for the series at the time. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Many people were obsessed with “Serial.” Why did you want to make another big series about Syed’s case?

I really wanted to examine the context of the story, of the aftermath of the exposure from the podcast — and just to see the environment. It’s really helpful to see people’s faces when they’re talking about such important details and the effect these events had on their lives. There was such devastation on all different sides, and I wanted to illustrate that visually, to take it one step further.

I also felt that the victim often gets lost in true crime storytelling, and I wanted to start and end the story with Hae Min Lee. I had access to her journals, and I felt very precious about that access, and about her friends and the trust that they offered. I just didn’t want to take that for granted. So the objective of this film to begin with was to bring a young woman full of hopes and dreams back to life.

How does one start doing all of that?

In the beginning I was trying to figure out, how do you tell the story? What’s interesting? And for me, it was the idea that this was a high school, and these were a bunch of kids who are trapped in these memories forever because of what happened to them. That’s why I called the first episode “Forbidden Love,” because it was all about just, you know, high school romance.

Do you think it’s fair to say that the series has a pretty clear perspective on Syed’s guilt or innocence?

I think that if you’re looking at the actual case that was presented in the trial, then it’s clear — not just from our perspective; there are court rulings that have vacated his sentence — that he’s definitely entitled to a new trial. Otherwise, you would have to find other evidence to support the convictions besides the testimony of Jay Wild (a former friend of Syed’s, who was the state’s key witness), which has been discredited.

I don’t know if you saw the opinions from the court of appeals and the special court of appeals, but they basically said that the state could not prove that this crime happened in the way that it was presented in the trial.

What would you tell critics who might say that the documentary is tendentious because of that clear perspective, if not manipulative?

If there is a potential wrongful conviction, I’m going to go into it with a certain slant. I understand what you’re saying. But I also was very clear with my producers and with the private investigators that we engaged that if we found out anything that showed that Adnan was involved (in the murder), we were going to take that path as well. It wasn’t like a clear slant. It was just that there was something wrong with this case.

The more you dig in, you do start seeing things that don’t add up with good detective work. And then you wonder why. The students I spoke to told me that the police detectives told them that (Syed’s) DNA and his fingerprints were in the car, and that’s not true. Little things like that are really manipulative, so the questions become more like, “What was the agenda?”

I did find the dramatizations of the audio-taped police interrogations with Jay to be pushing an idea of what happened that can’t be verified. Do you see yourself more as an advocate than a journalist?

I mean, I view myself as a storyteller, and this is a really interesting story that has a lot of different viewpoints. When you listen to those tapes, Jay’s voice and the way he has discussions is definitely different when he has to recite details and facts versus his personal accounting of things. His evolving story creates a lot of problems. I mean, how can you not remember the spot where you saw a dead body in the trunk? It doesn’t make sense.

So, yeah, it’s tough. But I apply the ethics of journalism in my fact-checking. And I am telling a story for a wide audience, and you have to find ways to dramatize certain things in order to make people understand them better.

Your documentary “West of Memphis” revisited another murder case that had been the subject of a well-known series. Do you feel a sense of duty to show people: “Hey, this isn’t just about the buzz; these are real people’s lives, and the story is still continuing for them”?

I think that this film can, by illustrating the story visually, give a greater understanding of it. But also, we take up our investigation where “Serial” left off, and a lot has happened in the case since 2016. When you mention his name to somebody, people just assume he’s already out of prison because he was granted a new trial two years ago. And the truth is that he may never get out of prison.

What do you find people’s appetite is for revisiting such cases?

I think people want satisfaction, and I don’t know that you’re finished with a story until you get some kind of closure. So there are these audiences already out there, and I think that there’s something in this for them: There are a lot of new investigative discoveries, and Episode 4 is really compelling in that way. And then there are a lot of people who just know the name Adnan Syed, and they don’t know the story.

I read something that compared true crime to an adrenaline rush, kind of like what we experience on a roller coaster. I think there’s an addictive nature to this whole idea of true crime. (This series) is just taking us closer to some ending on this case, and it just might not be a satisfying one. But I guess we’ll see.

Still, if you look at the attention “Making a Murder” Season 2 received, it was small compared to the first season. Why do you think that is? Do we care more about the water cooler talk and being part of the phenomenon than about the real humans at the center of these stories?

I guess that could play into it. I personally don’t want to believe that that’s why we like these kinds of stories. I feel like its more than that. There just has to be more than that.

As a person with a camera, I think that we have shown that there has been an impact from covering certain stories because of the pressure it puts on the state. If the phenomenon is what is encouraging exoneration, then we should continue doing this. So many people are affected by lost lives and wrongful convictions. It has to continue.

Do you have specific hopes for what the new revelations in your series might help achieve?

I hope that Adnan gets a trial. Because then there would be either an exoneration or an absolute conviction. And I think that he deserves that.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/arts/television/adnan-syed-amy-berg-documentary.html" id="60824342-2f3f-355c-ade2-900f73b6009d">The New York Times</a>.

When podcast sensation “Serial” debuted in late 2014, the man at its center, Adnan Syed, had been locked away for more than 15 years, convicted of the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. The podcast, which called multiple aspects of Syed’s conviction into question, was downloaded more than 175 million times, helping to propel a sequence of new developments that, until a few weeks ago, seemed to build in Syed’s favor.

Director Amy Berg on Why the Adnan Syed Case Still Matters

Revelations in “Serial” also helped advance the real-life case itself: the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore County high school senior, for which her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was convicted. “The Case Against Adnan Syed,” a four-part documentary series debuting Sunday on HBO, revisits that case, which has evolved considerably in the past several years.

If you don’t remember who Asia McClain is, or why she is important, you probably aren’t alone — the details of this case were fuzzy from the start. Here’s a refresher on the basics, along with updates on what has happened since “Serial.”

The Crime

On Jan. 13, 1999, Hae Min Lee left Woodlawn High School and never came home. About a month later, her body was found partially buried in nearby Leakin Park, at Baltimore’s western edge. The cause of death was strangulation. A police investigation led to Lee’s ex-boyfriend and classmate Adnan Syed. Syed pleaded not guilty and was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder and kidnapping. He was sentenced to life in prison and has maintained his innocence ever since.

The Background

Lee and Syed came from conservative immigrant families — Lee Korean, Syed Pakistani — and felt compelled to keep their romance a secret. Not long before Lee disappeared, she had broken up with Syed and begun dating a co-worker named Don. Part of what seems to have driven her and Syed apart was her frustration over not being able to bring their relationship into the open.

Lee and Syed were well-liked at school. Lee played lacrosse and field hockey and was described by a teacher as “one of those rare people you meet in life who is always happy, always joyful and full of love,” The Baltimore Sun reported. Syed played on the football team and was, by most accounts, a happy, charismatic young man who got excellent grades. He talked in “Serial” of smoking weed, but there was no indication he was into anything more extreme.

The Basics of the Prosecution

Prosecutors relied heavily on a few main pieces of evidence, none of it physical. The most important was testimony by a friend of Adnan’s named Jay Wilds, who told police he had helped Syed to bury Lee’s body after Syed confessed to killing her, on Jan. 13. According to Wilds’ court testimony, Syed had told him earlier that day that he intended to kill Lee. Wilds then borrowed Syed’s car for the day.

Later, Wilds said, Syed called him and asked to meet in a Best Buy parking lot. Wilds said that Syed had showed up driving Lee’s car, with her body in the trunk, asking for help. They eventually abandoned Lee’s car in a residential lot, he said.

Prosecutors presented cellphone tower records, which they said helped confirm Wilds’ final version of events. (His testimony had changed on several important points over time.) Another witness, Jennifer Pusateri, also helped confirm parts of Wilds’ testimony; she told the court that Wilds told her that Syed had shown him Lee’s body and had confessed to the murder.

The Potential Holes

Perhaps the biggest revelation in “Serial” was the existence of an alibi witness for Syed, a young woman named Asia McClain, who has said she was with him at the Woodlawn Public Library. If true, it would match Syed’s version of events. She was never called to testify.

Wilds gave two recorded police interviews and testimony in court. Inconsistencies on several major details have been pointed out among the three accounts. The credibility of the cellphone records — their technical reliability and their harmony with the prosecution’s timeline — has also been called into question.

Physical evidence gathered in 1999 was never tested for Syed’s DNA. The reasons for that aren’t clear, but Syed has reportedly said that his lawyer, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, never told him about the evidence. She was later disbarred by consent, in 2001, after a series of client complaints emerged. At the time of her disbarment, she told The Baltimore Sun she had been struggling with multiple sclerosis. She died in 2004.

The Season 1 finale of “Serial” revealed that the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Virginia Law School was looking at the case and hoped to persuade the courts to finally initiate DNA tests on the physical evidence.

What Has Happened Since?

By March 2018, “Serial” had been downloaded more than 175 million times. Koenig’s investigations had offered no clear opinion on Syed’s guilt, but they had brought to light the potential holes in the prosecution’s case and intensified public pressure to re-examine it. For many “Serial” listeners, the revelations made Syed something of a cause célèbre. (The court has said that public pressure was not a factor in its decision.)

That month, an appeals court vacated Syed’s conviction, recommending a new trial. The judges cited ineffective legal counsel by Gutierrez for, among other things, failing to call McClain, the potential alibi witness. McClain stated in an affidavit that she had sent Syed two letters after his arrest, which Syed has said prompted him to ask Gutierrez to contact her. Gutierrez later told him she had, and that nothing had come of it. That entire statement was later discovered to be untrue.

In June, a judge granted Syed a new trial, specifically citing the unreliability of the cellphone evidence. But Friday afternoon, the Maryland Court of Appeals reversed the lower appellate court’s decision and reinstated Syed’s conviction. In its opinion, the panel agreed that Syed’s counsel had been “deficient” but did not believe it had resulted in prejudice, “given the totality of the evidence against” Syed.

HBO has said that its new series, directed by Amy Berg, contains “new discoveries as well as groundbreaking revelations that challenge the state’s case.”

Lee’s family has always maintained that Syed’s conviction was just.

“We do not speak as often or as loudly as those who support Adnan Syed, but we care just as much about this case,” the Lee family said in a statement shortly after the new trial was granted. “We continue to grieve. We continue to believe justice was done when Mr. Syed was convicted of killing Hae.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/arts/television/the-case-against-adnan-syed-serial-hbo.html" id="451b7cf3-5325-3b91-ac09-f943275df39d">The New York Times</a>.

Hae. Adnan. Jay. For months beginning in late 2014, much of America was on first-name basis with the central figures in Season 1 of “Serial,” the true-crime podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig that became a pop culture obsession. Downloaded more than 100 million times, the series helped to bring podcasting into the mainstream and, along with TV series like “The Jinx” and “Making a Murderer,” kick-started a wave of serialized true-crime whodunits that shows no signs of ebbing.

'The Case Against Adnan Syed' Revisits the Crime 'Serial' Made Famous. Here's What to Know Before Watching.

In June, a judge granted Syed a new trial, specifically citing the unreliability of the cellphone evidence. HBO has said that its new series, directed by Amy Berg, contains “new discoveries as well as groundbreaking revelations that challenge the state’s case.”

Syed is still in prison, awaiting that new trial.

Did Adnan Syed kidnap and murder his ex-girlfriend and high school classmate Hae Min Lee in 1999? A Baltimore County jury in 2000 decided he did. Millions of listeners to the podcast “Serial” haven’t been so sure.

Viewers of Sunday night’s finale of the four-part HBO documentary “The Case Against Adnan Syed” will continue to wonder. But they will do so armed with new facts. Chief among them: A series of new forensic tests found no traces of Syed’s DNA on the many samples taken from Lee’s body and car during the original investigation.

The series’ director, Amy Berg, made good on HBO’s promise to deliver big revelations on a 20-year-old murder case that “Serial” made famous starting in 2014. Like the podcast, the HBO series offered no definitive statements about Syed’s guilt, but it did raise numerous questions about the methods and conclusions of the state.

What’s next? Whatever happens will arrive in a context very different from the one Syed faced less than a month ago, when the highest court in Maryland denied him a retrial, overturning the decisions of two lower courts. Here’s a quick look at the finale’s major revelations.

— Tests Did Not Find Syed’s DNA

Many samples were taken from Lee during the original investigation, including fingernail clippings and material from necklaces and clothing. New tests performed at the defense’s request revealed that none of the samples tested positive for Syed’s DNA. His DNA also was not found among samples taken from Lee’s car, where prosecutors have said they believe she was strangled.

No physical evidence against Syed was presented at his trial in 2000, so these findings could add heft to his innocence claim. Still, there is a major caveat: No one else’s DNA was found on Lee’s body or in her car, either. That means only that the killer, whether it was someone else or Syed, left no detectable trace among the areas sampled.

News about the DNA testing was first revealed Thursday by The Baltimore Sun, based on documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request. “These results in no way exonerate him,” a spokeswoman for the Maryland Attorney General’s Office told The Sun.

According to the documents, one female DNA profile not matching Lee was found on a piece of rope found near the place where Lee was buried. But that profile did not match anyone’s DNA in law enforcement databases. The DNA of investigating officers, who might accidentally have left some material behind, was eliminated.

— No Match for the Fingerprints

Latent fingerprints pulled from the rearview mirror of Lee’s car did not match Syed’s. The defense requested that they be compared with prints in the database.

They did not match with anyone’s prints in the system. Whoever left the prints has never been arrested and booked.

— More Questions About the Car

The state’s key witness, Jay Wilds, a former friend of Syed’s, told police that after he helped Syed bury Lee’s body, he went with Syed to ditch Lee’s car at a grassy lot in a residential area of Baltimore. Wilds led police to the car about six weeks after Lee was killed.

Private investigators hired by Berg asked Erik Ervin, a turf physiologist with a Ph.D. in horticulture, to examine the grassy lot, along with photographs of the car from the day police discovered it. Numerous factors — including the freshness of the tire tracks, the freshness of the grass blades visible in the treads and the condition of the grass beneath the car — led Ervin to believe that the car had been there for only a week at most.

— Autopsy May Not Match State’s Theory

The private investigators also spoke with Jan Gorniak, the chief medical examiner of Fulton County, Georgia. She examined the autopsy report and photographs and surmised that descriptions of Lee’s injuries did not in many ways appear consistent with the theory that she died during a struggle in her car.

Because of markings caused by a phenomenon called lividity, which Gorniak described as “the settling of blood after you die,” she said that Lee’s body must have lain for eight to 12 hours somewhere other than where she was ultimately buried, in Baltimore’s Leakin Park. Her assessment contradicts the prosecution’s timeline, which has Syed and Wilds burying Lee’s body about five hours after the slaying.

— New Contradictions in Wilds’ Testimony

Wilds gave two police interviews and testified at trial, and the contradictions among those accounts were well documented in “Serial” and in earlier episodes of the HBO series. They are significant and many.

Berg contacted Wilds, who declined to be interviewed for the series. He did, however, provide statements.

In them, he made several new claims. One was that police had coached him to say in his second taped interview that Syed first showed him Lee’s body, in the trunk of her car, at a Best Buy parking lot, not at a meeting point off Edmondson Avenue, as he had originally said.

The Best Buy location matches a map drawn by investigators based on cellphone geolocation records. Those records have themselves been called into question — a factor cited in the lower courts’ decisions to vacate Syed’s conviction.

In his statement to Berg, Wilds said that Syed showed up to his house in Lee’s car with the body in the trunk. This is new.

Also new: Wilds told Berg that Syed asked him to procure 10 pounds of marijuana. Wilds said that once the marijuana was acquired, Syed threatened to turn him in if he did not help bury Lee’s body.

The police and prosecutors have consistently stood by their methods and conclusions. According to Syed’s defense lawyer, C. Justin Brown, the state’s attorney general refused as recently as November to offer Syed any plea deal without a full admission of guilt and more prison time.

This article originally appeared in <a id="765f13cd-0b5d-4283-a9d1-70e9e6be628b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/arts/television/case-against-adnan-syed-dna-hbo-finale.html">The New York Times</a>.

HBO's closing arguments in a Maryland murder case

Note: This article contains spoilers for the four-part HBO documentary, “The Case Against Adnan Syed.”

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HBO's closing arguments in a Maryland murder case