How do you help someone you can only see through a screen?
Archive 81 is a an adaptation of the podcast of the same name produced by Netflix and starring Mamoudou Athie, Dina Shihabi, Evan Jonigkeit, Julia Chan, Ariana Neal, Matt McGorry and Martin Donovan. The debut season premiered in 2022.
Archivist and tape restoration expert Dan Turner is contracted by the CEO of a vague corporation (and shipped out to a remote research facility in the Catskills) to restore a series of Hi-8 tapes - recordings made in 1994 by a grad student named Melody Pendras ostensibly to document the lives of the residents of a historical New York building. As he works on them, however, he discovers, just as Melody does, that both the building and the people living in it are more than meets the eye.
The series has been met with mixed reactions across the board: people and critics unaware or unfamiliar with the podcast mostly praise it for its slow-burn horror and mixed-media story delivery, while fans of the podcast almost unanimously deride the changes made to the source material.
On March 24th, 2022, just two months after the show had aired, it was announced that it had been cancelled after just one season.
The show provides examples of:
- Adaptational Attractiveness: Dan is a lot less of a nerdy stereotype in the show, from the way he acts to his dress sense.
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication: Crosses over with Artifact Title, the reason the show is called Archive 81 is excised in the changes made to how and why Dan is put to work on Melody's tapes.
- Adaptational Gender Identity: Jessie the 17-year-old dude to Jess(ica) the 14-year-old girl.
- Adaptation Origin Connection: Dan and Melody have nothing but the tapes in common in the podcast, and Dan was merely unlucky in getting the job. Here... Not so much. Dan's father was Melody's therapist and involved with Visser. Dan himself immediately recognizes the Brown Note as the song his sister was playing on the piano the day his entire family perished in a house fire, and was recruited specifically because of his father.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In making Melody straight and replacing Alexa (her girlfriend) with Annabelle (her BFF with an unrequited crush on her), this is the largest points of contention with the show that the podcast fans have unrelated to the Visser.
- Adaptational Sexuality: Unexpected for a Netflix show, but Melody is straight in the series.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Kharonite.
- Anachronic Order: Almost entirely omitted in the adaptation, as all the tapes Dan interacts with in the show come either pre-sorted in chronological order for some reason or clearly labeled, but he receives sets of tapes with some temporal skips back and forth.
- Analog Horror: The adaptation upgrades it from audio tapes to Hi-8 but the purpose (and the nightmares) remain largely the same.
- Apocalyptic Log: Melody's tapes serve as this for most of the plot, since the fire at the Visser is a foregone conclusion.
- Artifact Title: There is only one ( actually two) archive in the series, so the 81 is never explained.
- Bizarrchitecture: The Visser's basement floors, as well as some parts of the research facility once Dan finds the hidden rooms.
- Brown Note: The ubiquitous melody, as heard by Melody and Dan just on the edge of hearing. And the series' soundtrack too.
- Catapult Nightmare: Dan and Melody both start having these as they delve into the mysteries of the Visser.
- Closed Circle: As in the podcast. The facility is isolated, with the only vehicle Dan has available being a bike (not optimal in chilly upstate New York), and the only way to contact the outside world without being monitored by LMG is to hike a significant distance to get a cell signal.
- Comet of Doom: Invoked and discussed in relation to Comet Kharon from which kharonite supposedly originates.
- Creepy Basement: Everything about the Visser's basement is not right.
- Creepy Cathedral: The research facility has one, abandoned much like the rest of it outside of the few rooms Dan uses.
- Crusty Caretaker: Mister John Smith, the Visser's caretaker, looks normal, but acts like people skills is something for other people.
- Cthulhumanoid: Kaelego. For whatever reason, its statue the splash image for the series on the Netflix interface. A Humanoid Abomination from another dimension.
- Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: The Leitmotif for the show uses the same melody as the weird chant that first tips Melody off that something weird is happening at the Visser.
- Dream Within a Dream: Dan has several, one of which features waking up in different locations.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: All over the place. The Brown Note melody that triggers seizures in certain people, the shadowy figure that Dan and Thomas see in their respective tapes.
- Ghost Amnesia: Invoked and later used by Dan when he decides that the Melody he sees is a ghost, but it turns out that the truth is more confusing.
- Missing Reflection: A Freeze-Frame Bonus, but when Melody keeps trying to break into the cabinet in Cassandra's apartment that she saw the Kaelego statue in earlier, when she is caught, in the mirror behind Cassandra we can see that the cabinet has no reflection.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Both at the Visser and the research facility, long panning shots of empty hallways are used to induce anxiety in the viewer.
- Painting the Medium: Played With. With all the various tapes and formats of video recording that show up and are processed by Dan, each bears unique quirks and quality shifts and even when the point of view dips through the fourth wall, e.g. by showing us what was happening to Melody as she was filming something, the sound remains muddled as still coming from the recording.
- Posthumous Character: Early on, we learn that the tapes Dan is handed were damaged in a fire and that 13 people died in it. The uncertainty of which characters in the 1994 storyline died and which lived is part of the mystery for the 2021 storyline.
- Room Full of Crazy: Annabelle's drawing studio in the Visser devolves into this at one point. A lighter version occurs in her psych ward when Dan finally meets her in 2021.
- Sequel Hook: Dan waking up in 1994, three weeks after the Visser fire and considered to be one of the survivors of it.
- Spooky Painting: Annabelle draws multiple once she is drawn deeper into the plot. Unusually for this trope, they are a positive plot device and not a malicious one.
- Spooky Photographs: A major plot point for the 1930s storyline.
- Spooky Séance: One is held by the Visser residents during a dinner party. It even goes horribly right, twice!
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In the penultimate episode, Lukas Vos decides he's had enough and walks out right before the Vos Society carries out its summoning ritual. However, we never learn what happened to him afterwards, and as far as any effect on the rest of the plot is concerned, he might as well have died in the fire which killed the rest of the Society members.
