Introducing “The Good Whale,” a New Podcast From Serial Productions

The New York Times and Serial Productions today announced "The Good Whale," a new six-episode podcast hosted by Daniel Alarcón. "The Good Whale" tells the epic story of what happened to the most famous orca in history - Keiko, the star of "Free Willy" - once the cameras stopped rolling and Keiko had to learn how to be wild.

The story ranges from Mexico City to Norway, from Oregon to Iceland. At every stop, Keiko faces long odds that a cast of dedicated scientists and trainers are determined to help him overcome. His unlikely journey culminates in the biggest challenge of all: can he live in the wild on his own, without the humans who have raised him?

New York Times All Access and Audio subscribers will get exclusive early access to the full series on Thursday, November 14. All others will get the first two episodes on November 14, with subsequent episodes released weekly. Listeners can find "The Good Whale" wherever podcasts are available and on the NYT Audio app. On Tuesday, November 19, a Spanish-language version of the first episode will also be available on Radio Ambulante, an award-winning podcast about Latin America, US Latinos, and Spanish-speaking communities around the world.

To help tell Keiko's story, the podcast will include a musical imagining of Keiko's re-emergence into the wild, written by EGOT-winning songwriting duo Benj Pasek & Justin Paul ("Dear Evan Hansen," "The Greatest Showman") with Mark Sonnenblick ("Spirited") and performed by actor and Broadway star Jordan Fisher ("Hadestown," "Teen Beach Movie"). The song, as well as a music video directed by Carlos López Estrada ("Raya and the Last Dragon," "Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero"), will premiere on Thursday, December 12 on YouTube and NYTimes.com.

"There is a lot of genre-bending going on in 'The Good Whale'," says Julie Snyder, the executive editor of Serial Productions. "Because Daniel Alarcón is a novelist and a reporter, the podcast is a literary campfire epic, a scientific exploration, and then - in a bit of a left turn - it's got a bit of Broadway musical thrown in, too. It's one of the most inventive stories I've ever heard."

In the summer of 1993, the movie "Free Willy" - about a captive killer whale that's heroically set free - was an unexpected hit. But when word got out that the real whale who played Willy, an orca named Keiko, was dangerously sick and stuck in a tiny pool at an amusement park in Mexico City, the public was outraged. If Warner Bros. wanted to avoid a P.R. nightmare and not break the hearts of children everywhere, then it was clear: Someone had to free Keiko - or at least try.

Keiko was hardly an ideal candidate for release. He'd lived in the care of humans for more than a decade, since he was a calf. He had millions of human fans but not a single orca friend. And he had missed out on uncountable lessons about how to live in the ocean - skills no trainer in the world knew how to teach.

"The Good Whale" tells the story of the wildly ambitious science experiment to return Keiko to the ocean - while the world watched. An epic tale that starts in Mexico and ends in Norway, the six-episode series follows Keiko as he's transported from country to country, each time landing in the hands of well-intentioned people who believe they know what's best for him - people who still disagree, decades later, about whether they did the right thing.

"The Good Whale" is hosted and co-reported by Alarcón, produced and co-reported by Katie Mingle, and produced by Alissa Shipp. The series is edited by Jen Guerra.

Alarcón is a writer, author, and podcaster. As the host of the Spanish language podcast Radio Ambulante, he has reported from Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and across the United States. Alarcón covers Latin America for The New Yorker, where he's written about everything from a constitutional crisis in Chile to the collapse of an iconic telescope in Puerto Rico to the Covid catastrophe in Ecuador. Alarcón was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2021 and his recent collection of fiction stories, The King Is Always Above the People, was longlisted for the National Book Award. He also teaches journalism at Columbia University.

Serial Productions is the maker of the blockbuster podcasts "Serial" and "S-Town," with more than 743 million total downloads. In previous seasons, "Serial" investigated a murder case, told the story of the court martial of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, spent a year inside Cleveland's criminal courts, and went to the Guantánamo detention camp. In July 2020, Serial Productions became part of The New York Times Co. Together they have launched several shows, including "Nice White Parents," a chart-topping series about the powerful forces shaping public schools; "The Improvement Association," a captivating true story about election fraud; "The Trojan Horse Affair," an investigative series about the mystery behind a scandal that rocked Britain; "We Were Three," an intimate look at how Covid affected one family; "The Coldest Case in Laramie," a limited series confronting conflicting stories behind a decades-old unsolved homicide case; "The Retrievals," a textured story about the treatment of women in medical settings; and "The Kids of Rutherford County," a narrative series produced in partnership with ProPublica and WPLN Nashville Public Radio. The series was a winner of a 2023 George Polk award for investigative reporting in podcasting.