Serial · Serial Productions & The New York Times

The Idiot - Chapter 1

March 26, 2026·22 min·2 clips

FBI agents arrested my cousin Alan for hiring someone to murder his ex-wife Priscilla.

The narrator starts with a family that has stretched a long way. Forty-five years after her parents brought her and her little brother from the Soviet Union, it now spans continents, spouses, in-laws, ex-spouses, children, and grandchildren. Then it gives way. The break centers on O, a child whose location matters because Priscilla is trying to start a Hague process after Russian police tell her they will not help. The narrator spots a possible opening. She asks a friend to connect Priscilla with someone at the Justice Department who handles these cases, and she knows an address in the States could matter. So she invites family over. Lena arrives with O while Alan is away, and the house folds the boy into ordinary family noise, even a human pyramid. Dinner does double duty. While turkey steaks go into the oven, the narrator asks the kind of school question New York City parents ask all the time. It works. Lena gives the address, and the narrator sends it to Priscilla. Later, they move again. The narrator works out the Massachusetts address too, following Lena, Alan, and O through Facebook posts, family messages, and weekends at her father's house on Cape Cod. She calls the role what it is. She is a double agent, passing Priscilla news of O while hiding the channel from the men in her family. Her daughter knows. The men do not, because she thinks they would see the contact as betrayal and might tell Alan. The story tightens around one hard question: what can one person do when a child keeps being moved beyond another parent's reach?

As heard by us

A family rupture becomes a tense account of loyalty, custody, immigration, and one quiet act of help.

The Idiot opens as a family story that has stretched across migration, marriage, grudges, forgiveness, and new attachments, until Alan's actions involving his son O make that elasticity give way.

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Why you'd press play

The family called itself elastic. This is the episode where you find out what finally snapped it.

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