It's great to have you back, Unsolved Mysteries. I'm still working my way through rewatching the entirety of the Robert Stack episodes and am currently on season 6 (sadly, it's no longer free on Prime Video at the moment, although it’s free with ads via imdb). The new Netflix series started strong — the two opening episodes about truly mysterious deaths are very good — but it steadily nosedived from there. As a superfan of the show, I have a few suggestions and general observations:
• We don't want to read Unsolved Mysteries. I don't care how great the mystery is — we don't want to read subtitles for 45 minutes. This is comfort food TV, not a stuffy foreign film. The offending episode, "House of Terror," about the murder of a French family, is, indeed, a fascinating case, but we don't want to read it.
• Keep things moving. One of the good things about subscription television is the emergence of sophisticated documentary programming without the constraints of the network television format. It's also a potential pitfall … all of that room to breathe and expound can lead to glacially slow programming. The old Unsolved Mysteries rarely gave the viewer an opportunity to lose interest; each mystery almost always wrapped up before the next commercial break. The storytelling was tight and incisive. Please keep it that way — this model of only one mystery filling out the entire show is fatiguing.
• The UFO episode was simply terrible. Not even a grainy Polaroid or out-of-focus home movie footage? Just people talking about what they saw? I love a good UFO yarn, but this was really weak.
• Consider a host. Robert Stack obviously can't be replaced, but it feels odd without the narration to help set the scene.
Six more new episodes arrive on October 19.
Also see // Streaming Unsolved Mysteries
