Unsolved Mysteries, the Netflix reboot, brings a classic TV series into the age of the internet sleuth – ABC News

When I speak by phone with Terry Dunn Meurer, the co-creator of Unsolved Mysteries, she has just come off a call with a detective.
It’s only a day or so since the series, originally broadcast on NBC in 1987, premiered in a revised format on Netflix. Already, sleuths are sleuthing, Reddit is fired up, and Meurer and her team are getting results.
“We were talking about the leads that had come in so far, trying to sort through those,” Meurer, speaking from LA, says.
The detective in question is investigating the strange death of Rey Rivera, a seemingly happy 32-year-old finance writer whose family do not believe his fall from a hotel rooftop in Baltimore in 2006 was a suicide.
It’s not the only tip Meurer’s received.
Some promising ones are already coming in about the death of 23-year-old Alonzo Brooks, whose body was found by a creek in a small Kansas town in 2004. His death is being investigated as a possible hate crime.
Alonzo Brooks, 23, went to a party in a largely white part of Kansas. His body was found by a creek weeks later.(Supplied: Netflix)
While declining to reveal the details, Meurer says “three different people gave us three different names of people who they think might have been involved”.
It’s not surprising Netflix would want to get involved in this kind of thing, bringing the show back 10 years after it last aired.
Through originals like Making A Murderer and The Keepers, it has helped drive the current true-crime obsession, which turns amateur sleuthing into an engagement metric.
But Unsolved Mysteries is a different beast in the internet age and has different responsibilities.
Watching the phones light up
The original series grew out of a few specials Meurer and co-creator John Cosgrove produced in the mid-1980s.
Together, the pair began to realise what could be achieved by harnessing the power of the audience to solve crimes.
“We’ve solved over 260 cases,” she says.
“Of the 1,300

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