The reboot feels like visiting your favorite restaurant under new management: "The food and decor is the same, but the fundamental reason for its existence - the memories - have been washed away," says Kristen Lopez, adding: "What made Unsolved so unique from America’s Most Wanted or Dateline was that everything unexplained was up for grabs.But it’s not as ironic as the decision to ditch the title cards announcing that Unsolved Mysteries is not actually a news broadcast, when spending 10 minutes on Facebook makes clear that those sorts of disclaimers are needed now more than ever." And it’s a bit ironic, considering that online communities like Reddit teeming with volunteer amateur detectives have grown exponentially in the 10-year gap between seasons 14 and 15 of Unsolved Mysteries. Where once (Robert) Stack had looked directly into the camera and announced in a deep, sonorous voice, 'You may be able to help solve a mystery,' now there’s just a title card at the end of each episode urging viewers to go to the Unsolved Mysteries website if they have any information. It's a bit of a letdown to go without a host, or even voice-over narration: "Aside from a sharp reduction in trench-coat-clad gravitas, the main result of nixing a series host is that the show’s crowdsourced element is pushed to the background.Normally I don't require hand-holding, but with documentary storytelling this mediocre, an authoritative host might have compensated for a total lack of tone." The host cements a tone and lets viewers know if they're supposed to approach what follows as grounded drama, high melodrama, utterly ridiculous or camp. I'm not sure what Stack gave to the original series was 'gravitas,' exactly, but the Untouchables star gave it a certain synthetic credibility, walking through fake fog in a real trench coat, that was perfect for what Unsolved Mysteries wanted to accomplish. Plus, then you decide to go host-less? Come on! Robert Stack is the first, second and third thing that I think of when I think of Unsolved Mysteries. But if you remove those re-enactments and don't replace them with re-enactments presented in an updated style - gimme Errol Morris' Unsolved Mysteries - or any compensating substance or rigor, the result is fairly generic, reasonably pointless and definitely has no connection to the Unsolved Mysteries brand. And don't get me wrong, a series in 2020 doing the sort of re-enactments Unsolved Mysteries was doing in 1990 would absolutely look silly. In the new version, the re-enactments have been limited to more traditional documentary-style filler, bridging scenes or covering for a lack of news footage. He adds: "The original series was driven heavily by re-enactments and, yes, sometimes they were cheesy as heck, but they were a way of illustrating claims or possibilities. Even though original Unsolved Mysteries creators John Cosgrove and Terry Dunn Meurer are leading the Netflix reboot, along with Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy, the new incarnation is "substituting generic cases and limited style in stories (episodes run less than an hour) that are too dull for a miniseries and too meekly investigated for a newsmagazine," says Daniel Fienberg.
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