Okay, I've managed to end up back in a theme, spoofs of true crime podcasts. I had murder in Arden, and now theft, though I would hope that would be obvious from the title of the show.
Ira and Julia own a cabin out by a lake, in an area to which they are wildly unsuited. As "city idiots", they fail to impress their neighbours, especially when they decide to go canoeing in the morning fog wearing only pyjamas, nearly die of hypothermia, find themselves in need of rescuing.
What better solution then, to throw a giant party for all the neighbours, ply them with food and drink, and let them sit in your three most desirable chairs. And boy, are they great chairs. Some expensive, some cheap, but all well loved.
Which means it's nothing short of a disaster when, the morning after the party, as Julia and Ira start cleaning up, they make a horrifying discovery. The chairs are gone. Lost. Missing. No longer about. Vanished. Other troubling synonyms.
And so begins the mystery.
They aren't the most skilled of investigators, but boy are they persistent. They're not going to be stopped in their quest to find their chairs, not by misfortune, propriety or even sanity. They will happily hunt through the remnants of other missing chairs, even send someone down diving into the lake in case it fell off the deck.
But above and beyond that, no one is above suspicion. I mean, come on, they're really nice chairs. Someone could have totally stolen them.
So the interrogations continue.
As you might imagine, this does not endear them to their neighbours, particularly with their hoity-toity city ways, like passive-aggressiveness and inability to reset a fuse.
It's a comedy, and a decent one. There's two major conflicts built in the show, both of which have different aspects. Ira and Julia don't agree on how best to deal with the problem, and have a wonderfully believable conversational style, with that snappy, occasionally snide back and forth that can develop over long relationships.
And then there's the bigger conflict, between the power couple and all of their neighbours. This is mostly episodic, with each episode featuring a separate possible suspect and matching investigation. It's mostly painful to listen to. You want them to succeed, but at the same time they're so bloody annoying that you're desperate for them to fail.
In the end, it's not some great quest, or powerful voyage of self-disovery, but it doesn't have to be. The back and forth between everyone involved is too much fun for me to care.
Nice and short at under two hours total, and definitely worth your time.
Take a listen to the first episode:
Tagged: Audio fiction Comedy Cast Fictional show True crime Serial