• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, May 8, 2024

“Only Murders in the Building” mined the true-crime podcast craze for comedy, and now, a true-crime podcast is at the center of “Bodkin,” a new mystery drama coming to Netflix on Thursday.

“Bodkin” concerns itself with the unsolved disappearance of three people from an Irish village some years earlier during an annual festival on Irish Halloween, October 31, known by its Gaelic name Samhain.

In the show, a true-crime podcaster from Chicago comes to the village with two others to investigate or otherwise dredge up the case, only to receive a chilly welcome from the villagers, who would rather let their sleeping dogs lie.

The show gets its title from the name of the village, Bodkin. In “Hamlet,” a “bodkin” is a dagger. A “bare bodkin” is one that is unsheathed.

“When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his famed “To be or not to be” soliloquy as he contemplates bringing about his own death -- “quietus” -- with an unsheathed bodkin.

The connection, if any, between “Bodkin” and Shakespeare is not made in Episode One of the seven-episode “Bodkin” that the TV Blog previewed on Tuesday. No one quotes Shakespeare or mentions him or “Hamlet” at any time.

Thus, the connection, if any, between the village of Bodkin and “Hamlet” remains a mystery, which might be the point. Bodkin is a mysterious little place.

The set-up of the show is that this earnest podcast personality from America -- Gilbert Power, played by Will Forte (above photo) -- has come to the U.K. to produce a podcast on this cold case.

The podcast, which goes unnamed in Episode One (unless I missed it), is positioned as hugely successful, including having won a Peabody Award.

The scenario is that Britain’s The Guardian newspaper has partnered with the podcaster for true-crime content, and an editor has assigned a hard-charging, cynical investigative reporter named Dove (Siohban Cullen, photo center) to assist Gilbert.

The assignment is a punishment of sorts for an unidentified story that went seriously awry for The Guardian and Dove, and the editor needs to send his reporter away to the boonies until the heat dies down.

Also in the mix is a naïve, rookie investigative assistant from The Guardian, Emmy Sizergh (Robyn Cara, photo right).

Dove thinks the whole thing is beneath her, especially and including acting as a helpmate to this podcaster whose investigative methods escape her.

I asked Google whether podcasts win Peabodys, and Google said yes. Last May, 2023 Peabody awards went to podcasts from public radio’s “In the Media” and “This American Life,” plus “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s” from Gimlet Media.

An estimated 23,000 true-crime podcasts are available now. On Audible’s list of its most popular true-crime podcasts you will find “True Crime All the Time,” “Crime Junkie,” “Morbid,” and podcasts spun off from TV shows -- “Dateline NBC,” “48 Hours” and “Snapped: Women Who Murder.”

While “Bodkin” is most assuredly a drama, the show takes a satiric approach to its characterization of the podcaster Gilbert Power.

He is portrayed as a cockeyed murder tourist who thinks he has stepped into a travel poster version of Ireland. 

His conception of Ireland is diametrically opposed to Dove’s. She is native Irish and left the country many years ago with no apparent intention of returning.

Like so many other TV shows and movies today, the “Bodkin” credits list executive producers too numerous to count.

Two stand out, however -- none other than Barack and Michelle Obama, whose production company, Higher Ground Productions, is one of the show’s producing partners.

“Bodkin” premieres on Thursday, May 9, on Netflix.