There’s a curious phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past decade that, whenever a person is seeking suggestions for interesting podcasts to check out, without fail someone is bound to recommend Mystery Show. I’ve begun to think of it as a sort of logical endpoint for podcasts as an artistic medium; any conversation about them, given enough time, will eventually come around to talking about Mystery Show. So, it’s only fitting that for the first anniversary of the Podcast Canon, we capitulate to the inevitable and devote this edition to one of the most consequential podcasts of its time, Starlee Kine’s inescapable masterwork, Mystery Show.
In case someone hasn’t pulled you in close and gone all Natalie Portman in Garden State on you about the program—you gotta hear this one [podcast], it’ll change your life, I swear—here are the particulars. Mystery Show was a podcast from Gimlet Media, hosted and produced by Kine, which ran for just six episodes in the spring and early summer of 2015. On each installment, Kine would attempt to solve the kinds of personal puzzlements that aren’t able to be easily answered with the help of the internet. The topics ran a seriously broad gamut, from a disappearing video store, to Britney Spears’ reading habits, to an especially enigmatic belt buckle.
However, the real magic of the show—and surely what has made it an indelible entry into the audio firmament—is not so much the what of each episode’s story, but rather the how. Kine’s sleuthing snakes a shaggy, serpentine path towards its resolution, replete with wondrous dead ends full of charm, wit, and humanity. This is down to her uncanny knack for disarming her interview subjects constantly coaxing stories from them that elude almost everyone else.
In a 2003 episode of This American Life titled “Time To Save The World,” Kine details her preferred mechanism for holding conversation, something called The Rundown, which gives her license to say or ask whatever she feels is the most interesting at the moment. She posits that people love to talk about themselves, provided you ask questions they know the answers to, and the results are often stunning. The ways that she connects with perfect strangers across her pursuits can be unexpectedly moving. Few other interviewers in the podcast realm are so doggedly focused on the human condition in the face of larger questions, stopping to take the time to ask deeply probing questions of a random bookseller, a contemplative soul in a Manhattan bar, a Ticketmaster customer service agent, or the co-creator of Welcome Back, Kotter.
In its way Mystery Show feels akin to something like My So-Called Life, where the mystique around it has only grown in the intervening years due to the inexplicable brevity of its existence. Both programs inevitably leave their audiences asking, “How is there not more of this? What were the people in charge thinking when they canceled it?” But canceled it was, in rather puzzling fashion as well. In October of 2016, over a full year after the end of its first season, Kine published a blog post revealing that she’d been let go from Gimlet. That abrupt end, and the way in which it was communicated, only left listeners to theorize all sorts of reasons why this eminently buzzed-about show was given the chop.
I wonder how it feels to be followed around by a program like this though. Kine has had a fruitful career in its wake, as a television writer for programs like Search Party, and co-hosting the occasional and enjoyable low-key podcast Election Profit Makers with one-time Mystery Show guest David Rees, but it feels like people still wonder what could have been, and why there hasn’t been any more since. It must be tiring.
In fact, it must feel particularly galling to witness the way a number of prominent shows and creators in the medium went through a sort of carcinization after Mystery Show was unceremoniously ushered off the scene. Kine’s old pal from her This American Life days, Jonathan Goldstein, kicked off his own celebrated Gimlet show Heavyweight that trafficked in a similar sort of shoe leather problem solving, albeit of the emotional variety. Reply All eventually breathed the same rarified air with their much-lauded episode, “The Case Of The Missing Hit.” After that show’s dissolution, its erstwhile co-hosts branched even further into that world—PJ Vogt with Search Engine, and Alex Goldman with Hyperfixed. Farther afield, indie gems like Underunderstood and No Such Thing evolved the concept to answer bigger, more pressing questions while keeping the same loose, dryly comic approach.
As seemingly universal the praise was, the show’s idiosyncratic timbre and unmistakable approach made it a target ripe for parody. A few years after its cancellation, authors and podcasters Amanda Meadows and Geoffrey Golden released an acidic send-up of the program called Mystery Solver that functions as a fictional sequel to a non-fiction podcast. It’s perhaps the only one of its kind that I know of. Meadows and Golden lampoon not only the show but also that era of Gimlet’s heyday, when being a podcaster was seemingly synonymous with navel-gazing, Peter Pan syndrome adults. Though there is certainly a sense of meanness in its mockery, in the end the series is so well observed that it comes off as a rather loving homage to the source material.
And, in listening back to all of Mystery Show’s episodes again for the first time in years, it’s seemingly impossible not to fall in love with it. There was nothing else quite like it, in terms of investment, quality, or crystal clear authorial voice. There may be only a handful of episodes, but there’s a potency in their paucity. It has produced one of the all-time great episodes of narrative podcasting in “Case #3 Belt Buckle.” It’s a product of a bygone time, when there was money enough to support this kind of globetrotting lark, chasing down the inconsequential in thrilling, emotionally resonant fashion. There will never be another show like it, even if there are several that are currently trying.
Making a show like this is, of course, not a solo affair. In addition to Kine, it was produced variously by Alex Blumberg, Melinda Shopsin, Eric Mennel, Wendy Dorr, Chris Neary, John Delore, and Eli Horowitz. Tune in next month when we’ll be diving into the BBC’s long-running music appreciation program, Soul Music. It’s a bit of low-key magic, a perfect little audio oasis to escape into during the rush of the holidays.
