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The long-running docuseries Unsolved Mysteries made it clear at the start of every show that it was not “a news broadcast”.

It didn’t even bill itself as a true-crime show, although unsolved crimes did feature heavily in each season.

The format, which included interviews with witnesses, dramatic reenactments of events, and voice-overs by Robert Stack (above), covered a range of themes from murders and missing persons to alien abductions, Bigfoot, and the supernatural.

Now, writes The New York Times, Netflix is bringing it back, rebooted and updated to keep up with the times.

The new “Unsolved Mysteries,” which reunites much of the original creative team, will debut Wednesday with a six-episode batch, to be followed by at least six more installments later this year. It arrives in an America it anticipated — a crime-obsessed, conspiracy-minded nation with increasingly subjective notions about truth.

The format has changed, but the blend of fact and folklore remains. It’s a combination that risks trivializing actual crimes by juxtaposing them with wilder content and legitimizing the uncanny through proximity to fact. Not that the creators see it that way.

The writer and producer, Terry Dunn Meurer, who also wrote and produced the original, say that they like the mix: “We’ve always thought of ourselves as a mystery show, not as a true-crime show”.

From the beginning, competing impulses powered “Unsolved Mysteries”: a crusading compulsion to seek for justice and a market-driven need to entertain. The show leaned heavily on reliable tabloid conventions — lost loves, missing heirs, unexplained deaths, medical mysteries — and many of the segments varied first-person interviews with best-guess re-enactments, some of them lurid.

Paranormal cases and alternate histories made the counterfactual (a conspiracy theory about Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, Bigfoot) into just another puzzle.

To put it simply, the writers just come up with every kind of mystery and conspiracy they can think of and they hunt it down, using an investigative team.

Check out the trailer for the reboot:

To give you a point of comparison – here are the intro and closing scenes of the first-ever episode of the show, which aired in 1988:

The series ran for a few decades and over time amassed a cult following. Back then, viewers would call in with tips for the investigator, or insight into elements of the investigation.

During its time on air, the show started helping authorities to solve crimes.

Of the solvable mysteries — a missing child, say, or unidentified remains — the show counts more than 260 as resolved, a clearance rate of about 34 percent. (“Bigfoot isn’t necessarily solvable,” Meurer said.)

Some of those solutions came via viewer tips. After a Friday night broadcast in 1988 about the fugitives Missy Munday and Jerry Strickland, a flood of calls had already led to their arrest by Saturday morning.

The makers of the show are hoping that with the reach that Netflix has, they’ll be able to solve more crimes through the series.

You can read more about the show, here.

Unsolved Mysteries is currently streaming on Netflix.

[source:nytimes]