[I’m on vacation until November 18, so my friends are looking after The Critical Condition. I'm thrilled to welcome Sarah D. Bunting--who describes herself as the "chief cook and bottle-washer at TomatoNation.com"--as she celebrates the return of "Unsolved Mysteries."]

Unsolved Mysteries is back.

You probably didn’t know that. You may not have known that it went away in the first place, because for the 15 years that it aired on and off on various networks and in and out of syndication, it did seem like the JAG of documentary television, in that you didn’t watch it, and you didn’t know anybody who did, and yet it just kept airing as though the executives had forgotten it even existed until flipping through TV Guide reminded them to cancel it.

You felt that way; I loved the show. I used to TiVo the syndicated reruns on Lifetime (shut up), because despite the show’s baseline crappitude — the wedding-video graphics; the dry-ice fog longtime host Robert Stack had to walk through in his melodramatic Stackum PI trench coat; the high-waisted light-wash Levi’s 550s and community-theater acting that sullied every re-enactment — it occasionally offered up a truly creepy segment. And you’ve got to give the late great Stacksie credit: He never let the frumpiness of the production get to him, and he intoned “s/he was never…seen…again” with the same solemnity each and every time.

When I found out the show had made a comeback (on Spike, basically Lifetime’s diametric opposite, which is kind of odd), I couldn’t wait to see it. I have a rather unhealthy obsession with various unsolved cases as it is, stuff like the Lindbergh kidnapping and Bambi Bembenek, and one of my favorite parts of the old-school Unsolved Mysteries was hearing “…Update!” Here in the age of the interwebs, I figured, many more of the cases would get solved — and the producers had probably “solved” most of the lo-fi presentation problems as well. Plus: Dennis Farina hosting! Love the Farina!

The Farina, new technology, an updated slate of kooky/creepy cases…you couldn’t have cared much less before, but maybe I sucked you in with the promise of a bright new Unsolved day, right? Maybe you reached for the DVR remote? Well, the thing is…don’t bother.

The new version does try, mixing together overviews of famous cases (D.B. Cooper, Resurrection Mary, the Black Dahlia) with updates of segments from the original show, and many of those do have “…Update!” at the end, which is satisfying (if somewhat depressing; invariably the missing turn out to be “the murdered”). The show looks a lot better, too, although in that respect it tries too hard, doing a lot of migraine-y PowerPoint nonsense with grainy old mug shots.

What hasn’t gotten an upgrade is one of the joys of the original: the drama-club reenactments, ported over nearly untouched from the eighties and nineties. Every awful perm, scraggly mullet, poorly thought-out orange lipstick, sleeveless-plaid-over-a-thermal grunge-by-numbers outfit, and run-down Chevelle has stayed the same, and every reenactment actor is still as anonymous as the day of filming — with one notable, and wonderful, exception.

That wonderful exception is revealed… after the jump!

Matthew McConaughey, wearing a cut-off-sleeved chambray shirt open to the waist and carefully misted with baby oil to simulate sweat, portrays a shooting victim with the gusto of a marionette who has just snorted a line of bees. It’s one of the most gloriously, eye-bulgingly, karate-kickingly, post-Taseringly overacted death scenes in the history of filmed entertainment, and I have watched Matt Dillon get aired out by Tulsa PD in The Outsiders about a hundred times, so I do not say that lightly.

McConaughey aside, you never see a day player in a UM “flashback” that went on to anything bigger than ghastly local ads for car dealerships. In their defense, much of the job is mime with a voice-over, which isn’t exactly a showcase for nuance, and the fact that they seldom look much like the real people they depict isn’t their fault either; you’ve only got so many morbidly obese actors in the first place, never mind ones willing to undergo a Soviet-prison dye job for the SAG minimum. And the budget acting is part of the fun anyway.

Unfortunately, Dennis Farina is pitching his work at the level of the budget, versus that of his talent. My friend Jonesey, the only other person who gives a crap, theorized that Farina’s involvement in the show is a condition of his probation for that airport gun charge he picked up back in May, and while he’s not exactly phoning it in, he’s certainly not bringing the gravitas that Stack used to. With good reason, of course — the only people left in the English-speaking world who aren’t familiar with the Jack the Ripper case, the Amish, don’t have TVs anyway, so why pull a muscle doing the narration — but Farina’s refusal to commit to the commentary completely subtracts a critical element of creepiness from the product as a whole.

It just isn’t the same. The CGI, the remixed theme song…yeah, it all looks and sounds better, more professional, but the original’s allergy to slickness made the stories seem truer somehow. The bad hair and the lighting that washed everybody out, the self-seriously Ghoulhouse Rock Casio credits sequence, it had a deadpan sincerity that came off damp most of the time — but when it worked, it really worked. The new version is better assembled, but something’s missing. And I don’t mean Amelia Earhart.