Mystery Show

» see gimletmedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Starlee Kine came out of This American Life with a format and a constraint. The format was that she would solve a mystery for somebody. The constraint was that the mystery had to be one you could not solve by typing it into a search engine, which in 2015 was already a narrow category and is a narrower one now. A video store that vanished overnight, a belt buckle with no provenance. The answer in each case existed somewhere, inside a person who had to be found and then talked into talking.

Six episodes went out between 21 May and 31 July 2015 and the reception was immediate. Apple named it the Best New Podcast of 2015. The Atlantic put "Belt Buckle" at number one on its list of the fifty best podcast episodes of that year, describing it as unrelenting in its playfulness and joy with a sense of profundity sitting just under the surface. Years later the praise was still arriving: the New York Times called it utterly captivating in 2021, the Guardian called it a podcast classic in 2022, both of them writing about a show that had not released anything in six and seven years respectively.

What the audience got told, in a January update on the show's Facebook page, was that season two was in the works.

~ the case file ~

~ the april nobody was told about ~

Kine had been let go by Gimlet Media in April 2016, in the early stages of producing that second season. The audience found out in October, six months later. Nothing was published by anyone in between.

On 6 October 2016 at 20:49 UTC she posted to Medium under the title "Hi everyone." and to the show's Facebook page, saying she no longer worked at Gimlet and that there would be no season two. The post describes losing the staff and the budget at once, along with the email address. The same day, Gimlet put up a piece called "The Future of Mystery Show" stating that the show was "unsustainable to produce and publish on a consistent basis, and therefore Gimlet will no longer produce new episodes of Mystery Show", adding that they were in discussions with Kine about her producing it independently. Those discussions did not produce a seventh episode.

~ what unsustainable meant ~

The company was not wrong about the arithmetic. A Mystery Show episode required a host to physically go find a stranger who did not know they were part of a story and then come back with usable tape, and there was no way to schedule that or make it cheaper. Six episodes took ten weeks to release and considerably longer to make. Gimlet in 2015 and 2016 was scaling toward the Spotify acquisition that eventually came in 2019, and a show that could not be put on a calendar does not survive that kind of growth. Reply All and StartUp had production models that could absorb a weekly slot. This one never did.

~ where the link goes now ~

gimletmedia.com/shows/mystery-show redirects to open.spotify.com, which returns a 404. The show is still streamable elsewhere under the Spotify catalog, but the address Gimlet printed on the show's own Wikipedia page as its external link resolves to a page-not-found served by a company that bought the network four years after the show stopped.

I came to this one backwards, through a list of podcasts with end dates attached, and the thing that stopped me was the premise rather than the ending. A show whose entire rule was that the answer could not be googled is a 2015 idea in a way that is hard to recreate. The archive of it is six episodes long and complete, which is more than most shows in this archive can say.

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