'Serial' Season 3 is coming your way -- and it's taking on criminal justice

Get ready for a podcast to completely take over your life – again. Serial is back Sept. 20 for Season 3, with new episodes every Thursday.

According to a press release from the Serial team, Season 1 was downloaded over 16 million times. The phenomenal popularity of Serial's 2014 debut was a key factor in the resurgence and rise of podcast culture. It also led, remarkably, to the revisiting of Adnan Syed's contentious murder conviction (though things are moving slow).

In Season 3, Serial goes right into the nitty-gritty and often uncomfortable flaws of the criminal justice system, specifically in Cleveland. From drug possession to full-on felony, each episode or batch of episodes will focus on a different crime and how it goes through the system.

“Every case Emmanuel [Dzotsi, a reporter] and I followed, there came a point where we thought: No, this can’t be how it works,” says host Sarah Koenig. “And then we were like, Oh! Oh my god. This is how it works! This is how it happens! People who work in the system, or have been through the system, they know this. But millions more people do not. And for the past year I’ve had this urgent feeling of wanting to kind of hold open the courthouse door, and wave people inside. Because things are happening – shocking things, fascinating things – in plain sight.”

The first two episodes of Serial debut Sept. 20, on Apple and Google podcasts and Pandora.