Five good things about BuzzFeed’s Unsolved

 

It may not technically be TV, but boy oh boy is it binge-worthy.

BuzzFeed is all over our news and social media feeds (often, admittedly, uninvited), and their many, many, many series on YouTube can take a lot of sifting through to find something worth watching for longer than the initial 30 seconds it takes to realise the title of the video is a lot more exciting than the video itself.

The Unsolved series, however, hosted by Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, is made of all the right stuff. It’s equal parts genuinely funny and super creepy, and ultimately a very easy to watch, entertaining online doco/chat show.

Each episode of Unsolved ranges from 10-30 minutes approx, and with the exception of a couple of two-parters, each video tackles a different unsolved mystery or open case. Currently, there are two different categories: “Supernatural,” which covers ghost stories, alien encounters and other strange phenomena, while “True Crime” examines real-life murder mysteries, disappearances and more from throughout history. Even if you’re a massive wimp like me and have to skip all the ghost ones, there is still plenty of inexplicable events to astound you.

Ryan and Shane make the perfect duo for a show which relies so much on the unknown. Each episode involves the willing-to-believe-and-easy-to-convince Ryan, aided by useful animations, eagerly delivering his painstakingly researched case to Shane, including all evidence, testimonies and most widely accepted theories. Shane, ever the sceptic, interjects with dismissals, snorts and eye-rolls at every turn.

While the key to this series is that the mysteries are unsolved, and often have been for decades, having them laid out for you piece by piece and drawing your own conclusions by the end is a lot of fun. If you’re looking for a couple of detectives who solve crimes then you’ve come to the wrong place, but on the rare occasion that the hosts put something together, that seems to have been missed until now, it all gets very exciting.

For anyone obsessed with true crime or other trashy mystery documentaries on TV, Unsolved is a bite-sized, easy-to-follow, relatively neutral and consumable version of that, with the additional sprinkling of silliness. If you’re a little intrigued but not quite convinced (I was doubtful when the show was described to me at first), I urge you to throw on the YouTube playlist and give it a try.

But be warned, Unsolved can get quite addictive. Though, you might just learn a thing or two about the weird world we live in. That, or two hours in you find yourself questioning everything and everyone around you. Sorry Mulder, but the truth might not be out there after all.