Mystery Show: Case #1 Video Store
May 22, 2015 3:02 PM - Subscribe

The Case: Laura rents a video. When she tries to return it the next day, the video store is gone. 
posted by Tevin (17 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
I really liked this show. So much so that I listened to it twice and immediately wrote a review.

I'm not sure I explained myself very well in the review but I really want more podcasts to use more non-podcast personalities and people who are accustomed to being in front of a mic. There's a kind of ... sterility ... even in the most extemporaneous shows and talking to "regular" people helps with that.

Pretty high on this show though. Can't wait for more.
posted by Tevin at 3:08 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I sooooo do NOT need another podcast but Tevin's review has me intrigued. I'll give it a whirl and see if it grabs me. I enjoy Reply All, so another Gimlet podcast couldn't hurt.
posted by jazon at 3:43 PM on May 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


You had me at "Starlee Kine podcast". I've been a fan ever since the Phil Collins segment on TAL. And this episode was fascinating, BTW.
posted by Cash4Lead at 4:41 AM on May 23, 2015


Yes, I enjoyed this. The premise of the podcast seems wide enough to be interesting and novel for the medium.

And I do enjoy Starlee Kine. I even named one of my Pokemon after her once. It was a bird Pokemon Starly that I renamed Starlee because that's better.

Loved the song at the end. The scoring for the episode overall was really well done.

What I love about podcasts now is that the premise here almost didn't even need to be there. You could have called this podcast "The Starlee Kine Programme" with a promise of 20 minutes with her doing whatever she wanted weekly and I know I would have enjoyed it.
posted by inturnaround at 11:42 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


You had me at "Starlee Kine podcast". I've been a fan ever since the Phil Collins segment on TAL. And this episode was fascinating, BTW.

This is definitely interesting and weird, in a way that is very Starlee Kine. However, it does feel like it might end up being another version of Wiretap - that is, another TAL producer being given a venue to take their particular quirky brand of TALness to its maximum extent.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:47 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


(To be clear: I like the show, but I don't think it's going to be the magic bullet that makes Gimlet into something more than just-another-podcast-network.)
posted by Going To Maine at 11:48 AM on May 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure how I felt about this show. I wasn't particularly familiar with Starlee Kine before (although I will check out her Phil Collins TAL, for sure) so I'm still adjusting to and evaluating how much I like her quirkiness.

Did anyone else feel like the "conclusion" wasn't satisfying? Maybe her friend's memory was just poor, but it didn't feel like the mystery was totally "solved."
posted by radioamy at 11:14 AM on May 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


I love Starlee Kine on TAL, and I want to love this podcast, but the first episode didn't do a lot for me. I think maybe I let my expectations get too high, and bought too much in to the "I solve mysteries" concept. I was hoping for a real mystery, conclusively solved. This seemed to be more about a semi-mystery semi-solved, mostly attributing it to the failings of human memory. Like radioamy said, not super satisfying. I guess they're going more for interesting characters and storytelling rather than stories that are inherently interesting, which is fine, but not exactly what I was hoping for. I'll stick it out though, at least for a few more episodes.
posted by primethyme at 3:23 PM on May 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm a little confused - how was this not conclusive?

And, more so, how could it have been any more conclusive given the circumstances?
posted by Tevin at 5:35 PM on May 24, 2015


I'm a little confused - how was this not conclusive?

In New York there must have been hundreds if not thousands of video stores at one time. They found one that was open at approximately the right time, closed around the right time, and was in approximately the right neighborhood. That's the totality of the evidence that it was the right store. But the circumstances of the actual closing are in direct conflict with the original person's memory, and I'm willing to bet that there were other video stores in the general area around that time. It could have been one of those for all we know. So basically it felt like "we're out of time for this episode, this is the closest thing we've found, so we're just going to call it the answer."

Beyond that, "it was a totally normal event that you just happened to remember wrong" is not a terribly interesting or exciting answer.

And, more so, how could it have been any more conclusive given the circumstances?

I think it's more that the circumstances made it a not very interesting story. A podcast about "ordinary things people mis-remembered" is a lot different than a podcast about "solving mysteries." But like I said, this might be more about the preconceptions I had going in than the actual quality of the podcast (though I blame some of those preconceptions on the build-up). It was well produced, I just thought the story was boring (and only a truly surprising conclusion would have redeemed it).
posted by primethyme at 6:10 PM on May 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


>But like I said, this might be more about the preconceptions I had going in than the actual quality of the podcast (though I blame some of those preconceptions on the build-up).

Yeah I can see that. I got what I was expecting but I can see how it would be frustrating if you were expecting something more thorough.
posted by Tevin at 7:45 PM on May 24, 2015


I think it's more that the circumstances made it a not very interesting story. A podcast about "ordinary things people mis-remembered" is a lot different than a podcast about "solving mysteries."

I think that my problem with the first episode was similar. I'm fine with Kine trying to find solutions to ordinary, sort-of-mysterious questions and using that as a jumping off point for weird explorations of mind and memory, and I'm also fine with her definitively solving real, true mysteries (though I can't say that's how it sounded to me in the trailer). In this episode, the show seemed to try and split the difference by being an off-the-wall ramble through odd clues with a blue-sky possible video store, but in the wrap up she sounded like she was saying that, yep, she'd definitely cracked this case.

Similarly, I felt like the episode didn't really have a good button on it that tied everything up. To my mind, Kine's close didn't really tie up the fact that her friend didn't think that this was actually the store, nor did it really tie together all of the directions in which her investigation had gone. It just kind of stopped.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:43 PM on May 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I agree with others here that the ending was very unrewarding. But, I'm also enough of a Starlee Kine fan that I'll definitely listen again.

Couldn't it have been that because his business was failing that maybe he wasn't bothering to open every day. She went to the video store, saw a "Closed" sign on the door (at the time, just meaning closed today), but maybe she assumed it meant closed for good. Then, the next time she was in the neighborhood again, maybe weeks/months later, it was definitely closed/gone.

Probably some holes in this theory as well. But it seems more satisfying than her friend just misremembered the whole thing.
posted by marsha56 at 4:03 PM on May 25, 2015


As a veteran retail worker I believe I have an answer to the final mystery: customers don't read signs. Not even the smartest, nicest customers will read signs. Especially if it's a store you've never been in before, and there's a lot of visual information coming to you, which in video stores, there's a ton - your brain is busy with the task of picking a movie to watch, and there's only so much you can process.

And I can believe that the fading local video store didn't have the best and most obvious signage up, or have their stock on sale in the most prominent location. So, no one was lying, I reckon, just perceiving very differently.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 11:28 AM on May 27, 2015 [2 favorites]


The inconclusive conclusion turning into a meditation on memory seemed like if it wasn't outright, it was bordering on, a satire of the "oh-my-god you are over thinking this" wrap-ups of so many documentaries and especially public radio documentaries. That is what I liked about the whole thing, it took those tropes in the presentation of a hard-hitting piece of "serious journalism" and applied them in the service of making whimsy. This was great.
posted by selenized at 11:06 PM on May 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


I liked the ads! I hate, hate, hate ads. But the ads in this were fantastic. Even the obligatory Squarespace ad!
posted by infinitewindow at 2:42 PM on June 15, 2015 [1 favorite]


Large chunks of the second one are her having weird conversations with sales people over the phone. The conversations are, at best, tangential to the topic of the show.
Interesting, yes.
Advancing the narrative, no.
posted by Seamus at 3:45 PM on June 15, 2015


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