Seems hard to recall a time when I didn’t like podcasts, especially when there are shows like Unwell to keep me happily occupied. When I first started trying to listen to podcasts, I had a hard time finding shows that made it worth struggling through my audio-processing issues. Now, frankly, I’m drowning in them! And more keep coming out every month! I just added Crypto-Z, Palimpsest, Liberty: Tales from the Tower, Point Mystic, and others to my playlist.
But my current favorite has to be Unwell.
The Premise:
Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery
A fiction podcast about conspiracies, ghosts, and unusual families of blood and choice.
Lillian Harper moves to the small town of Mt. Absalom, Ohio, to care for her estranged mother Dorothy after an injury. Living in the town’s boarding house which has been run by her family for generations, she discovers conspiracies, ghosts, and a new family in the house’s strange assortment of residents.
Minor spoilers
That really is a reasonably accurate summary.
But it also elides over the complex issues raised between Lily and her mother Dot. Not only does Lily learn that Mt. Absalom is haunted, but she learns that her mother is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. And Dot is in denial.
The first season arc is based around Lily and Dot’s relationship. Mothers and daughters, always good food for drama. Dot left Lily and her father to come run her family boarding house in Mt. Absalom when her great-uncle died and Lily only got to see her during the summers. Lily has a lot of built-up resentment (justified or not) that she has to work through. And Dot Harper is not an easy woman: she has strong opinions, a quick tongue, and is resentful of her daughter looking at her like an invalid. She also keeps secrets. About herself, about the town, about the house they live in. So until they get their relationship sorted, the first season explodes into pointed fights at the drop of a frozen pizza. It’s so…accurate. Painful, fascinating, plausible. Yet often funny.
As a straight-up drama about a mother and daughter trying to reconnect in a strange small town, it would be a win. But then there are the ghosts. And the town history. And the woods that may or may not have wolves in it. There’s a constant simmering unease of the best sort happening here.
There’s also an antagonist: the local man-of-all-trades, Chester Warren, who turns out to be the point man for the Delphic Order, which desperately wants to take Fenwood House out of Dot’s hands and into their own for reasons yet unknown. But he’s not a mustache-twirling villain. He’s kind of a smiling good guy who just feels like things would be better if everyone did what he wanted for the good of Mt. Absalom. Whatever that ill-defined “good” is.
The first season raises many story questions, and really only resolves the relationship between Lily and Dot, which clears the way for the second season to burst out into full exploration mode: Lily and Dot are going to figure out what’s up with Mt. Absalom.
So far, the second season seems to revolve heavily around the ghosts and the Delphic Order’s perpetual attempt to take Fenwood House from Dot. There’s a brilliant new ghost; vegetarian Abbie goes undercover at the diner that only serves meat; Rudy takes on a new job and risks his life to fix a historical wrong; Lily and her mother bond over trying to talk about the things in Mt. Absalom no one talks about. I love it!
Each week, I find myself thinking, okay, now that was a good episode, the next one won’t be as good. I mean, how do you compare an episode where Rudy nearly dies in a mystical mishap to Lily and her mother going to a city council meeting? Except the city council meeting nearly brought me to tears with Dot’s story arc.
More things that I really love about this podcast:
The characters: The primary cast consists of Lily, Dot, Abbie, Wes, and Rudy, from Fenwood house; Chester and Hazel, from the Delphic Order; Marisol, Stella/Spikes, and the Old Man from the Woods as townies. And they all shift and change and move around each other as the story progresses. They might start out as friends or eye each other with suspicion; they might grow to like each other or feel betrayed.
Some of these characters might be ghosts. Some of them might be something else.
Speaking of the ghosts. They are delightful, and they come in different types. There are the ones who just don’t seem to be bothered with being dead. They’re fully corporeal. There are the ghosts who are more ghostly, incorporeal beings with a mission to complete; there’s an amazing ghost created of echoes in season two who is a wonderful character. Places can be ghosts in Mt. Absalom, buildings that reappear, subtly wrong, like the house where all the pictures only show the backs of peoples’ heads. There are ghosts that pop in and out like people stepping in and out of time.
And then there are the other things that are off: there is something going on in the woods that is opaque but deeply unsavory. I can’t wait to find out what it is! The woods are centered in a lot of the local folklore and it’s rarely in nice stories.
Fenwood House isn’t exempt either. Not only does it have ghosts, but it also has a bizarre door that is sometimes there and sometimes not. Sometimes that door is open.
There’s an observatory that may or may not be built over something very strange and dangerous, where watering the floor seems to help keep it down. There might be a death ray.
The set up — a boarding house in a small, strange town — allows for a wide variety of characters and gives everyone a history with everyone else. It also makes them secretive: either because they just assume the newcomers like Lily already know the way things work, or because they don’t want to air their dirty laundry. It creates a great atmosphere for the podcast: friendly, yet spooky.
Podcasts are often composed of so much dialogue that any clunkers really stand out. Here, the writers create really convincing dialogue for each character. It’s quirky, full of odd stylistic choices, but still somehow plausible. Great at getting information across but not dumping it awkwardly. I was looking at the transcripts while writing this review, and they’re so dryly funny in so many places. And heartbreaking in others.
The voice actors are great across the board, covering emotional ranges from curiosity and humor to genuine pathos.
Unwell is weirdly tongue-in-cheek for a Gothic. Like all good small-town horror stories, there has to be a local festival that has outsized importance in the townsfolks’ lives: but here, it’s the Celery Festival, where people compete to come up with a new jingle for the local celery soda.
There’s a ghost tour in town, full of faked “hauntings,” except the whole tour is run by a ghost.
Entire episodes can be built around mundane details like “Lily loses her phone,” which starts off as a minor inconvenience, morphs into farce, then into creeptastic territory before ending on a mundane level.
And if you give it a try, don’t forget to listen all the way through each episode! They do post-credit bits. Usually, just a line or two about some part of Mt. Absalom history, but those bits are usually revealing.
In Conclusion: Unwell is my favorite ongoing podcast because it consistently gives me good writing and characters I can really care about.
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