Decoded

My new favorite TV show is Brad Meltzer's Decoded, a semi-serious exposure of the mind as the slave to desire. In this case, the desire is to want to know the unknowable or to debunk the mythical, or to substantiate curiosity for the sake of television drama. It's a unique combination of skepticism and wonder that both gets on my nerves and serves up a series of better-than-YouTube quality investigations with a cast of sympathetic characters. 

The characters, Scott, Buddy and Mac, are an attorney, professor and engineer who drive around in a Porsche Cayenne to visit various authorities, researchers, crackpots and experts on the trail of finding the plausible truth of some mystery a little bit weightier than an urban myth. In that, it is very much like Mythbusters but without the edge. In the course of inviting the more dubious witnesses and theorists on camera, the team has to behave politely whereas the Mythbusters could just do everything on their premises without that need. The show has a future if they can get past the first dozen episodes and narrow thngs down to something for the less gullible. It would be a great step forward from the disembodied voices of the standard Discovery-style documentary hackery, ok well Time-Life started this crap way back when. 

They've handled Hopi/Nostrodamus/Mayan end of times myths, theories about the survival of John Wilkes Boothe, mysteries around the Bohemian Club, and secrets of the construction of the Statue of Liberty. All pretty good subjects for inquiry. But very much like Man Vs Wild, a lot of the drama is sustained for the camera. There's an attorney on board and there are very quick was to get to the bottom of whether or not the constructor of the American Stonehenge in Georgia can be identified. There's a record of his purchase of the land that either can or cannot be legally divulged. They've talked to environmentalist wackos, haters of the Masons, as well as scholars at the Smithsonian, National Archives and reputable universities. It's a great mix of semi-authoritative drama, rather like National Treasure for grownups, it makes historical research fun. 

The show is at its best when the trio sit and have some hardball discussions about what they think might be real and what's just crazy, generally over a MacBook and a coffee. That's good TV. I give it four stars out of five. The 2012 episode was just a bit too doofus, whereas the tresspassing on the property of the Bohemian Grove was astounding.