“This season we pretty much strap ourselves to that desk,” says Bergara, adding that there’s not a lot to find when the murder scenes have been renovated into, say, a Wetzel’s Pretzels. In a change from previous years, the Ghoul Boys won’t leave their studio to see locations of some of these murders, which they’ve done a handful of times for True Crime. Shane Madej (left) and Ryan Bergara (right), behind the scenes of 'BuzzFeed Unsolved.' BuzzFeed
Says Bergara, “We do our best to balance tone between dark and goofy that occurs almost every time.” Seriously, you won’t believe how much humor there can be found in murder. A lot of these cases have very gross negligence of the authorities, or the criminal themselves are just a very stupid person.” Bergara reiterates points he made to Inverse last year: “These are tragic and very sad occurrences, but we’re able to find the humor in some of the lighter places in the cases. While making jokes can be unseemly when also talking about murder in literally the same breath, the hosts are careful to not cross any distasteful lines. “Like an armchair investigator.” This, the two believe, is what allows them to tell jokes even when discussing the most gruesome murder cases. “We take an everyman approach,” Bergara adds. “Because we do have a tone that is humorous, with recent stuff we don’t want to make light of anything that is affecting someone in a huge way,” Madej says. There’s also the matter of a true crime case being too fresh to find any humor, a key ingredient to the show’s popularity and accessibility for new viewers. There are quite a few cases the hosts (and even their production crew) are eager to explore, but many of them are “teetering on the brink” of being solved. It’s odd to cover a case and a year later, the episode is nullified by the fact the case is solved.” But also there’s a possibility that these cases may get solved. “There may be more details to the case that would make it better to cover. It makes sense to wait a little bit,” Bergara says.
“Usually when there’s a case in development, there’s still details coming out. And there’s a good, if also practical reason why. The Westfield Watcher is about as recent as the hosts are willing to explore. “Obviously we’ve covered a lot by now,” Madej says, “but in Ryan’s effort to find more interesting cases, it’s yielded some very bizarre stories.” The rest of the season, the hosts tease, is just as chilling. Their story went viral in a November 2018 story published by New York Magazine. In the premiere, the hosts combed over the recent case of the “Westfield Watcher.” In 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus and their three kids moved into their dream home in an affluent New Jersey neighborhood, only to be “greeted” by a stalker who sent disturbing letters in their mailbox.
The series is divided into two shows, Supernatural and True Crime, and it was the latter show that brought back Madej and Bergara to the channel’s 2.2. On March 22, BuzzFeed Unsolved returned for its landmark tenth season. “A couple cases we have are just plain nutty,” Madej tells Inverse. “I like to keep him in the dark so that he can react in a fresh way,” Bergara says.
It takes place with a room full of people going, ‘Oh, that case is very interesting,’ or ‘No, we can’t do that.’ We have a team of people that help create the list we’re gonna cover.”īut co-host Shane Madej, the skeptic to Bergara’s eager believer, is kept out of the process entirely. “There’s more heads in the room,” series creator and co-host Ryan Bergara tells Inverse ahead of the season premiere. But how the “Ghoul Boys” pick their cases has changed a bit since they first started back in 2016. Ten seasons in, the hosts of BuzzFeed’s popular web series BuzzFeed Unsolved: True Crime are still the same: They’re still “goofy lads” who explain grisly murders and real-world ghost stories to the amusement of millions everywhere.