Cluedunnit: A Rewatch Podcast Of Silliness & Crime Solving

 Some podcasts are one-trick ponies. Oh, so good at what they do, but what they do is one thing over and over and extremely well.

 The podcast Cluedunnit is more like the Swiss army knife of podcasts. The podcast exists as an entertainment show, a TV show, a mystery show, a comedy, a whodunit, and an art critic show. 

And all these moving parts work in sync to create a podcast that is eminently worthy of your ear time. The first episode -- about Psych -- aired in late August 2021 and the show has been building interest and listeners since then.

Here's the premise of Cluedunnit: "The gun rings out, the character drops to the floor – another mystery procedural has begun! TV sleuths have 60 minutes (at least!) to figure out whodunit. To Jacob Coakley and Jessica Hird, co-hosts of the Cluedunnit podcast, that seems like entirely too much time. On each episode of their comedy TV rewatch podcast Cluedunnit, they immediately guess the perp before there are any commercials – or clues."

From the Cluedunnit people, they define their show this way: "Each week we watch a show and immediately guess whodunit, without any clues, context, or — apparently — accuracy. Then we spoil everything. We not only tell you who did it but also who made it, with fascinating looks into the careers, lives, and trivia of the artists themselves. If it’s got a mystery, we watch it! Cozy mysteries (we see you Hallmark); police procedurals; private eyes and their fancy cars; TV classics from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and today; comedy mysteries (Psych, anyone?), and lots more. We even go worldwide, with mysteries from Britain (home of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, they know a thing or two about mysteries), Australia, and more."

Cluedunnit has guessed on TV case-of-the-week episodes from such different series as the hot new shows Poker Face and So Help Me, Todd, silly series like Psych and Monk, costume pieces like Frankie Drake Mysteries and Vienna Blood, noir thrillers like the ABC Murders, and Endeavour, cozy Hallmark mysteries like Murder, She Baked, all the way to classics like Murder, She Wrote and Magnum P.I. Jessica and Jacob love them all – including ones they haven’t heard of yet.

“Every mystery starts a new game,” says co-host Jessica Hird. “Of all the various suspects, who do you bet on? Guy-With-A-Mustache? Lady Germaphobe? Or Sexy-Stranger-With-The-Menacing-Stare?”

“Mystery novels were originally called ‘The Grandest Game’ by mystery author John Dickson Carr,” adds Coakley. “He argued that a good detective story was a hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader. Well, in any duel it’s always best to shoot first. So we go off half-cocked, making the best guesses we can, as soon as we can. Of course, we’re very often hilariously, irredeemably wrong.”

Each episode of Cluedunnit also includes compelling tidbits from the biographies of the creators and cast of the mysteries. And on top of that, this season includes mini-episode interviews with individual writers from the TV mystery shows covered on the podcast like Sara Saedi from iZombie and Tracy Friedman from Murder, She Wrote. These deep dives make watching the shows even more rewarding. I highly recommend the Saedi interview from March 8th. 

Of course, you must be a TV show fan to enjoy the show. The hosts use the Roku Channel and other streaming services like Tubi as their "go-to" so that listeners can watch the show and the episode in which the whodunit occurs. 

While the premise is wild and mildly neurotic, the co-hosts deliver an amuse bouche of comedy, knowledge, TV reviews, informative TV history, and a wildly over-caffeinated view of their mystery solving skills.

Jessica Hird has created and hosted multiple podcasts, including Grilled Cheese & Gin, a non-fiction podcast about changing careers and This F***ing Stucco House, a comedy fiction podcast following a woman searching for redemption after getting dumped on a famous house-hunting show. As an actor, she appeared in the 2001 Sundance hit and cult office comedy Haiku Tunnel as well as the award-winning stage show How To Be A Secret Agent Girl (SF Fringe “Best of the Fringe”).

Jacob Coakley is a writer, screenwriter, podcaster, and playwright. His scripts have been recognized by the Austin Film Festival, Cinestory, Final Draft Big Break, and more. His plays have been developed at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference and the Nevada Conservatory Theatre’s Homegrown Playwright’s Festival. He was editor-in-chief of Stage Directions magazine for 11 years and his writing has appeared in The Las Vegas Weekly, BLVDS Magazine, Desert Companion and others.

The co-hosts mesh well together, like plump shrimp cocktail and tangy cocktail sauce. They're funny, bright, and adept at summarizing the often indecipherable plots, characters, and contrived universes of some of these TV shows. After all, how do you describe Haven or Grimm or even Psych?

“It is so much fun to uncover new shows for listeners, but it's the best to watch shows recommended by listeners,” says Hird. “And of course we want our listeners to guess along with us! We share what episode we’re watching and where you can view it, stream it, download it, whatever it takes.”

“As a mystery consumer, you are free to make your whodunit guesses quietly to yourself. No one knows if you actually got it right or wrong, and it's fine either way,” says Coakley. “We just guess out loud so our ill-advised, half-baked stabs in the dark end up as your comedy.”

Rest assured though, whoever you guess, each episode of Cluedunnit will tell you who was right, who was wrong, and who is dead.

The nice thing about Cluedunnit is the journey to learn about these TV shows is just as rewarding as the destination, which is solving the mystery.

I recommend you check out the podcast Cluedunnit.You get to listen, learn, laugh, lampoon, and link the clues together. 

And, for the last time, it's not the butler. Or Colonel Mustard.