Serial · Serial Productions & The New York Times

The Idiot - Chapter 4

March 26, 2026·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

Judge Curley walks Alan through every chance he had to stop the murder-for-hire plot and didn't.

Alan begins in remorse. Facing a possible ten-year sentence, he tells the judge he is ready to serve whatever comes, and the trial recordings seem to have landed hard. Priscilla listens on Zoom. His apology is meant for her as much as for the court, with Alan promising not to hurt her or the children again. For a minute, he sounds different. The narrator catches it because this regretful version of Alan does not match the man the story has been building toward. Then the chapter rewinds. The so-called tutoring business is really looser, and better paid, with Harvard students writing papers for Babson students. The scale is hard to miss. Alan says there were more than a thousand clients, about twenty-five writers, and in a very good month, maybe ten thousand dollars. He pauses when the IRS comes up. That little hesitation says plenty. The money mattered, but being needed may have mattered even more. Usefulness becomes his private weather. He had been useful to his mother, the narrator says, and now classmates and clients wanted things from him too. Status follows the service. From there, Alan moves through law school in Connecticut, a Manhattan law firm, and possible routes into the FBI or CIA. McKinsey makes everything bigger. In Moscow, he lands in a small consulting group close to the post-Soviet economic transformation. The narrator knows that world. The chapter leaves Alan caught between confession and ambition, asking how the need to be useful hardened into the person later judged in court.

As heard by us

A measured chapter about Alan, contrition, ambition, and the hunger to be needed.

Serial's The Idiot - Chapter 4 catches Alan in a moment where remorse, self-explanation, and performance are hard to separate. It opens with his apology to Priscilla and his children, his voice breaking as he tells the judge that losing access to them has already become its own…

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Why you'd press play

You sit with Alan at sentencing, then rewind through the paper-writing business that had more than a thousand clients.

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