'Bodkin's Real Mystery is Its Inability to Dig into the True Crime Genre
No one’s denying that the podcast zeitgeist has wholly vanished from popular culture – it’s still a veritable yet dubious industry now dominated by celebrity-hosted TV recaps, centrist history lessons, and, yes, the dark shadow of True Crime. But a TV show in 2024 centered on the ubiquity and surface-level flaws of the global investigative podcast movement raises a few eyebrows. I mean, how many original reporting true crime podcasts do you hear about these days? No doubt they exist in swarms, but their time as moment-defining pieces of media has come and gone.
This is one of the reasons that, from the off, Bodkin feels a little misjudged. The Netflix series, inexplicably produced by the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground (their first scripted drama!), takes a mismatched group of podcasters to Ireland (the series was filmed entirely on location in Ireland, including in Cork, Wicklow and Dublin) to dig into a decades-old missing-persons case that the local residents would rather stay buried.
We follow acid-tongued Dove (Siobhán Cullen), Gilbert the bumbling yank (Will Forte), and tryhard intern Emmy (Robyn Cara) as the minute town of Bodkin shifts around their intrusive presence, tying itself in knots to conceal a complicated and grief-tinged past. But the quips about podcasts, how serious journalists look down on them, and how they’re popular with even the remote listeners, feel a bit tired. This angle of Bodkin’s premise would land better if the series were made earlier in the entertainment timeline, capitalizing on the true crime craze.
