The show originated on Discovery Inc.'s Travel Channel in 2010, and new episodes still run there. We've been catching up on years' worth of shows, and it makes for interesting and educational viewing. This, kiddies, was the kind of thing that fellow Discovery Inc. channel TLC used to air, back when its letters stood for The Learning Channel and not, as I imagine is currently the case, Theater of Lunatics or Childbearing. Each episode of Mysteries at the Museum focuses on several objects found in museums throughout the United States, with occasional visits to other countries, and the stories behind these objects. War, love, theft, murder, plague, science, accidents, chicanery, achievements -- everything is grist for the mill here.
There's no thematic connection to the objects shown in most episodes. A memorable one, at least for me, looked at the gun Squeaky Fromme used to try to kill President Ford, the mysterious Hodag of Wisconsin, and New York's own original Typhoid Mary, among other things. Each story gets about ten minutes of TV time, sometimes breaking for commercials on cliffhangers, and then it's off to the next museum and the next thing on display and what it means. I annoy my wife sometimes if I know what the story is when they start the discussion, as I am more of a student of history than she is. "Shut up! Don't give it away!" she says.
I think it's great. Wildman has the perfect sincerity as a narrator, and heck, Mike Rowe can't narrate everything. The enactments by actors who don't get any lines (thus no pay for speaking) are cheap and cheesy, but it's fun sometimes to see how the producers are going to re-create scenes from something as crazy as Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan's flight across the Atlantic. They showed the actor fighting the elements and a leaky fuel line in something that looked fine to me as the cockpit of a 1929 Curtiss Robin, but I would not be surprised if airplane experts were screaming at the TV screen.
It's cable. They do what they can.
The show gives context to objects on display, and makes one think more about the items one sees in a museum. I hope kids like it; I think I would have liked it when I was a kid. The stories are short enough for kids to follow, and sometimes people get shot and blown up 'n stuff, which is always cool. To begin to grasp the past, a kid has to learn the broad events, then start filling in the flavor of the time by following threads; this series is fun for that. Interviews with curators and other historians help make the stories come to life. Some episodes stretch the connection between something at a museum, like in the case with Corrigan -- the museum in question did not have Corrigan's plane but a similar one, and that gave them the excuse to run with the Corrigan story. Hey, a great story is a great story.
But a recently rerun episode on the Ball train watch caused an argument between my wife and me. The show said that the Ball's legendary timekeeping ability, important to prevent disasters like the 1891 Great Kipton Train Wreck, is what gave us the origin of the phrase "on the ball." I maintained that it's a sports expression, probably coming from baseball or maybe golf, where one must keep one's eye on the ball. The Internet strongly favors my interpretation, and the Ball company (now owned by a Hong Kong company but located in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland) doesn't even mention this bit of legend on its Web site. So there! I win!
If you've never seen the show but you like history, check it out. They may make the occasional gaffe, but at least Mysteries at the Museum doesn't run with flat-out fabrications like some other cable channels I know.
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