Unsolved Mysteries

I'm a big fan of the old unsolved mysteries with Robert Stack ane Dennis Farina, so I was definitely piqued when I saw this on Netflix.

But, the Netflix version of this show seems so much slower and doesn't have a host at all. The only thing that I can recognize being similar to the old shows is the music.

Overall, I'm not impressed. The original (older) unsolved mysteries would have had 3x or even 4x the stories in the same amount of time take as by the 6 episodes on Netflix. Also the original unsolved mysteries is just more concise and engaging.

_The Twilight Zone_ and _Unsolved Mysteries_ were two shows in the late 1980s that simultaneously enthralled and terrified me. Even rewatching old episodes of _Unsolved Mysteries_ on Amazon Video as an adult still gave me an odd creepy feeling. Maybe it’s Robert Stack, maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the fact that many of these cases still remain unsolved, but it still intrigues me today. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Netflix has resurrected the series.

There are six episodes and all the old topics are covered from mysterious deaths, to missing persons, and paranormal experiences. This version however does differ quite a lot from what we got in the 1980s. The two big things are that there is no host, and there is only one case per episode. The end result of this is that it feels more like a docuseries of standalone 45min documentaries connected only by the fact that they are all unsolved. I much prefer the old style where Robert Stack introduced each story and there were four or five or more stories.

What I liked was that they weren’t just "someone's gone missing and we don’t know what happened” type stories. The opening story about the death of Rey Rivera is perplexing, a real head scratcher, and was, I think, the best episode in the series. No matter what explanatory angle you take, you hit brick walls. I also liked the UFO episode as it was one of those cases where it wasn't one isolated person that experienced it, but a whole lot of people across a wide area. Also, I should point out that there is one episode entirely in French about a French family in France. Its a very interesting case, but did seem a bit out of place in what has traditionally been an America-centric series.

At the time I'm making this there's only six episodes released which they are calling Volume 1. While it's quite different to previous incarnations of the show, I enjoyed it and am looking forward to seeing what turns up in Volume 2.