Back in 2017 and 2018, I binge watched more than 200 episodes of Unsolved Mysteries after several seasons of original show were added to Amazon Prime. Thanks to the release of those episodes, a new generation of viewers discovered the program and interest in the show soared. I had hoped that all that interest would lead to even more vintage episodes being released. It didn’t.
Instead, it led to a reboot of the series. The fifteenth season of Unsolved Mysteries debuted on Netflix on July 1, 2020. Six of the season’s twelve episodes have been released, with another six scheduled to be released later this year.
While the rebooted version of the show has retained just enough ties to the original to maintain its nostalgic fan base, the show has been completely restructured. Instead of featuring four mysteries in a single (almost) hour-long episode, the new episodes focus on a single story line. When the show was originally rebooted on Spike TV back in 2008, original host (then deceased) Robert Stack was replaced by Dennis Farina, with disastrous results. This time around, the show’s producers didn’t even try. The new episodes are host and narrator free, with additional information relayed to viewers through text. This time around, they’ve also dropped the reenactments that made up the majority of the original show.
But more has changed than that. Of the six episodes that have been released so far, five of them deal with unsolved deaths. Only one of the six episodes deals with unexplained phenomenon (the infamous Berkshires UFO incident of 1969.) Because the original show typically featured four separate mysteries, there was a little something for everyone — an unsolved murder here, an encounter with Bigfoot there, and so on. The new episodes feel more like episodes of Forensic Files. The new episode seem more adult in nature, and a little more depressing.
Perhaps the biggest shift in tone is how un-unsolved the new unsolved mysteries feel. In at least two of the episodes, people confessed to the crimes, only to recant their confessions or have them thrown out. Neither of those episodes felt particularly unsolved to me. In the episode “House of Terror,” a man’s entire family was murdered and buried in his backyard, and police have been searching for the family patriarch (Xavier Dupont de Ligonnès) ever since. Again, this case doesn’t seem particularly unsolved.
The biggest difference between the old episodes and the new ones is the internet, and not only because that is the way the new episodes are being delivered. Fans of the show have been gathering in various online forums (including Reddit’s Unsolved Mysteries Subreddit to put their collective heads together in an attempt to solve the mysteries. In return, the producers of the show have electronically shared unaired information and documents about the cases to those attempting to solve them. This has generated a lot of noise, but the show’s producers have reported that of the 1,500 leads they’ve received, 50 have been deemed credible and passed on to the authorities.
Despite the change in tone from the original series, I did enjoy the reboot so far, and am looking forward to the next six episodes being released later this year.
