Three days to go until the collection of enigmatic events and places known popularly as ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ will land on Netflix with a slate of new episodes.
The classic television series which ran for over 23 years across platforms like NBC, CBS, Lifetime and Spike, uses re-enactments and interviews to retell the circumstances of mysteries that have remained unsolved.
Covering crimes, tales of lost love, unexplained history and paranormal events, the show as intended to encourage viewers to provide information that might help solve the mystery.
Over a decade after it went off-air from American TV, the show will return in an OTT format to Netflix and is said to have changes made to its original TV format to suit the streaming world.
This time, the show will also open itself to a global audience and its creators Terry Dunn Meurer and John Cosgrove, also its original creators, are ready to take on the challenge.
The show technically never went “off-air” though. It was available for streaming on Amazon. However, according to co-creator Meurer, “there are too many mysteries in the world that remain unsolved.”
Speaking to The Post about reviving “Unsolved Mysteries”, Meurer said that he and his partner had been trying to get the show back in production ever since the last original aired.
“We had meetings with networks along the way but nothing felt like the right fit.
Netflix is the perfect place — we can produce international stories and can also reach out to a worldwide audience to try and solve mysteries in different countries,” he said.
There’s no host
This time around, the show will not have a host thought. As fans may know, the show’s original host was the veteran media personality Robert Stack.
According to Meurer, not only was it difficult to fill Stack’s very large shoes, having a host seemed like a limiting agent in the new going-global scenario.
“We wanted this be in the documentary world, where the people whose mysteries these episodes involve are more present and more of the storytellers.
(From) family members and law enforcement, we (also) go on location to get more of a sense of each case.
We don’t try to come down on one point of view and try to create as balanced a story as we can,” he told The Post.
Mysteries are also international
With a strong team of researchers, the show has expanded itself into mysteries from all over the world instead of just the American continent.
In the second set of six episodes that will premiere later this year, there are two internationally-shot episodes.
However, the first six also have one episode set around a French man who murdered his wife, their four children and their two pet dogs before burying them all under their patio.
There will also be mysteries from the sister American continent with stories being stacked from Brazil.
The premise of the show is that someone somewhere knows the truth of the events it covers. Though there is a mix of paranormal events and gory crimes, there is always a touch of mystery and not just true-crime.
Comment below and let us know if you were a fan of this American TV show and how excited are you with its return.
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