‘Archive 81’ Creators Set Their Next Podcast, Conspiracy Thriller ‘Wavelength’ (EXCLUSIVE)

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Podcast creators Dan Powell and Marc Sollinger, the duo behind popular horror series “Archive 81” — which has been adapted for television by Netflix — have set up their third podcast, “Wavelength,” involving a mysterious and sprawling supernatural conspiracy.

The 10-episode first season of “Wavelength” is set to premiere Feb. 16, 2022, on all major podcast platforms. The series is produced by Dead Signals, Powell and Sollinger’s production company.

In “Wavelength,” after investigating a mysterious incident at a tech company, two government agents are drawn into a strange conspiracy involving secretive billionaires, eccentric artists, college professors –and otherworldly entities. Like “Archive 81,” the series uses a “found-footage” conceit. “Wavelength” is a mystery “about the monsters we create, and the people who have to fight them,” according to the pair.

“Archive 81,” which debuted in March 2016, was the first podcast from Powell and Sollinger. The story revolves around an archivist’s investigation into an old cache of videotapes that hold clues to the existence of a demonic cult in an apartment building. The New York Times called it “innovative” and Nerdist featured the show on a list of “10 Horror Fiction Podcasts to Haunt Your Dreams.” Netflix developed it into a TV series that premieres on the streamer this Friday, Jan. 14, executive produced by Rebecca Sonnenshine (“The Boys,” “The Vampire Diaries”) and horror maestro James Wan (Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring film franchises).

“We really think that ‘Wavelength’ pushes forward what fiction podcasts can be,” Powell and Sollinger said in a statement. “It takes what we’re doing with ‘Archive 81’ and it takes it to the next level. We believe the combination of mystery and horror is really unique and plays to the strength of the audio medium. We’re so excited for people to take a listen.”

Dead Signals’ second podcast was “The Deep Vault,” released in 2016. It’s set in the almost-post-apocalyptic U.S. about a group of longtime friends as they journey from the uninhabitable surface world into a mysterious underground bunker in search of safety — encountering robotic servants and monsters in the claustrophobic, steel-reinforced walls of The Deep Vault.

Powell and Sollinger have backgrounds in audio storytelling, having worked at The New York Times’ The Daily and The Moth.

Pictured above: Dan Powell (l.), Marc Sollinger

5 good Netflix shows this weekend: Archive 81, Cheer season 2, and more

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In from the Cold release date, cast, synopsis, trailer and more

In from the Cold release date, cast, synopsis, trailer and more by Sabrina Reed

Happy weekend Netflix Life readers! Hopefully, you are filling up your January with some great new Netflix shows.

There are some fantastic series that have released new seasons within the past month that are wildly popular. Cobra Kai, Stay Close, Emily in Paris, The Witcher, and Queer Eye have new episodes.

If you are in the mood for a great comedy binge, check out Community, Space Force, 30 Rock, New Girl, Schitt’s Creek, and many more.

Best Netflix shows January 15, 2022

Check out the top 5 best Netflix shows to watch this weekend!

Archive 81

The new horror series Archive 81 is now available on Netflix. This series is inspired by a found footage podcast of the same title.

This series sees archivist Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) on the job of restoring some videotapes from 1994. As he delves deeper into the story, he makes a strange, supernatural connection with the documentary filmmaker Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), whose tapes he is working on.

From the looks of the trailer, this one will be enjoyed by fans of supernatural horrors.

Cheer season 2

The sports docuseries, Cheer, has released its second season recently, and it is already sitting at number one on the Netflix top TV shows list for this week.

The series follows the College Bulldogs Cheer Team from Corsicana, Texas, coached by Monica Aldama. Fans love the reality series for amazingly talented members of the cheer team and the fierce competitions that the group must perform in. Their ultimate goal is to compete in the National Cheerleading Championship held annually in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The House

The new release, The House, is a unique concept that sees a different director for each of the three chapters in the first season. Each of the stories tells a different story related to the same house.

The series tells connected yet standalone stories that run about 30 minutes each in a proper anthology format. The stories are dark, creepy, and morbid, so keep that in mind if you have some younger viewers. The House was recently released and praised for its stop motion animation.

Some voice talents include Helena Bonham Carter, Matthew Goode, Claudie Blakley, Miranda Richardson, and Paul Kaye.

Sweet Magnolias

The series Sweet Magnolias currently has one season to stream, with a second coming on Feb. 4. This is the opportune time to watch the first season while preparing for the second.

Sweet Magnolias is based on the series of novels by Sherryl Woods. The series follows three gals who have been best friends since childhood and live in South Carolina. They help each other through all the growing pains of life, romance, career, and family.

The series stars JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Brooke Elliott, Heather Headley, Logan Allen, Anneliese Judge, Carson Rowland, Justin Bruening, Chris Klein, and Jamie Lynn Spears.

Bridgerton

Season 2 of the period romance Bridgerton will release on March 25. For now, you can revisit the splendor of season 1 that is available to stream.

The series is based on a series of novels by Julia Quinn that follows the Bridgerton family of Regency London. Bridgerton was created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shonda Rhimes.

Season 1 focuses on the eldest daughter, Daphne, and her introduction into society to search for a perfect match. The series brings to life the lavish days of the Regency when the ton came out for the season. Things are even more interesting as a new columnist, Lady Whistledown, circulates her newsletter reveals everyone’s deepest secrets to all of society.

What Netflix shows will you be watching this weekend?

Netflix’s ‘Archive 81’ Is the First Binge-Worthy Horror Series of 2022

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Quantrell D. Colbert / Netflix

In Archive 81, cinema is a figurative and literal gateway to other worlds. The notion that the movies are a transportive portal is nothing particularly new—especially in the horror genre—but showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine and executive producer James Wan’s eight-part Netflix series (based on Daniel Powell and Marc Sollinger’s podcast of the same name) nonetheless finds new ways to enliven its underlying idea, along the way paying tribute to the many chilling ancestors that paved the way for its malevolent tale about a young man tasked with restoring video tapes about a calamity that befell a community decades earlier. Taking a kitchen-sink approach to scary storytelling, it cleverly and entertainingly resurrects, and reinvents, that which came before it.

Following in the footsteps of John Carpenter’s Masters of Horror anthology entry Cigarette Burns, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, Joel Schumacher’s 8mm, Hideo Nakata’s Ringu and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio—as well as The Blair Witch Project and its legion of found-footage progeny (notably, the V/H/S franchise)—Archive 81 (Jan. 14) charts the ordeal of Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie), an employee at Queens, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, where he’s renowned for restoring and digitizing damaged old movies. With patient and meticulous care, he untangles, cleans and respools ravaged celluloid and VHS material, bringing long-moribund relics back to life. In light of his expertise, Dan is contacted by Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan), who runs a mysterious firm known as LMG, about a private job: relocate to a remote Catskills research facility and repair a collection of camcorder tapes that were shot by Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), who in 1994 was making a documentary film about Manhattan’s Visser apartment building when the place went up in flames.

The ‘Scream’ Requel Doesn’t Cut Very Deep

Dan, whose best friend Mark (Matt McGorry) is the host of a spooky podcast dubbed Mystery Signals, accepts this offer, and promptly sets up shop in Davenport’s eerie concrete-walled facility, immersing himself in Melody’s recordings. Thus Archive 81 establishes its found-footage set-up, with Dan functioning as both a viewer and the spiritual collaborator of Melody, whose non-fiction work he’s helping to complete.

Story continues

What he discovers in Melody’s tapes, however, is more than he bargained for, since Melody’s time in the Visser led to some startling revelations, beginning with the fact that many of the residents enjoyed getting together to rhythmically chant, huff and hum in devoted prayer to a monstrous statue like demented cultists. With the aid of 14-year-old Jess (Ariana Neal), who served as her tour guide, Melody met many of these individuals, none more charming and welcoming than Samuel (Evan Jonigkeit). Alas, it quickly became clear to Melody that Samuel was possibly wrapped up with this covert cabal, whose operations may have also taken place on a forbidden sixth floor, as well as had something to do with the wealthy Vos family, whose mansion burned to the ground in 1924 and was replaced by the Visser.

The more Dan watches Melody’s tapes, the more he’s drawn into her investigation into the Visser—and, consequently, the more he grows suspicious of the motives of Davenport, whose LMG is a shadow corporation, and whose research bunker is outfitted with security cameras (the better for Davenport to keep an eye on his employee) and rife with secret rooms, hidden passageways, and off-limits basements. Moreover, Dan soon learns that he may be connected to Melody via his father Dr. Steven Turner (Charlie Hudson III), who perished along with the rest of Dan’s clan in a bizarre conflagration. The deceased are an ever-present and noisy presence in Archive 81, and Sonnenshine further accentuates the spectral mood through references to a variety of supernatural classics—Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House—having to do with haunted abodes, grieving loners, and restless ghosts.

Directed by Rebecca Thomas (Stranger Things), Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson (The Endless, Marvel’s upcoming Moon Knight) and Haifaa Al-Mansour (Mary Shelley), Archive 81 looks great and moves at an urgent pace, and it piles on homages (my favorite is a nod to Daniel Mann’s 1971 Willard) and supernatural elements with delirious gusto. Totemic shrines, Satanic rituals, ancient artifacts, seances, human sacrifices, tarot cards, exorcisms, witches, time travel, parallel dimensions and snuff films are all part of its unholy package. So too is murky VHS static and visuals, which lend the action an additional layer of unsettling opacity. Sonnenshine and company, however, don’t lean too heavily on their found-footage gimmick; the more the show proceeds down its tangled path, the more it presents Melody’s plight in traditional form, thereby creating a dual-narrative track that evolves in unanticipated and head-spinning ways.

Not every development in Archive 81 appears to make total sense, but the series strikes a pleasurable balance between allowing its audience to stay one step ahead of its story, and delivering surprising bombshells and twists. Kids’ complicated feelings about missing parents—whom they want to believe were good, despite potential evidence to the contrary—is merely another layer to this surprisingly rich endeavor, which is led by strong performances from Athie as the cinephilic Dan (whose pet fixation is The Circle, a lost black-and-white film that’s related to the Visser and the Vos clan) and Shihabi as the doggedly probing Melody, determined to uncover the truth about the Visser and its connection to her own heritage. Their turns keep Archive 81 from falling into a convoluted rut, providing a bedrock measure of humanity around which the show’s insanity can smoothly and crazily revolve.

Central to Sonnenshine’s saga is the power of the moving image (and its attendant soundtracks)—an entrancing force capable of conjuring up alternate realities where our wildest dreams and most terrifying nightmares can come true. That’s at once a description, and the subject, of this inventive Netflix series, whose winding plot ultimately leads to a cornucopia of out-there madness involving comets, possession, demon gods and an aged, unfinished silent documentary that’s both a template and conduit for apocalyptic hellfire. A playful ode to the dangerous allure of the movies, it demands to be watched closely, obsessively—even if, as it suggests, the consequences for doing so might be deadly.

Dina Shihabi Trusts the Process

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The stars have aligned to bring Dina Shihabi good fortune at more than one crucial juncture in her acting career. First, they came together to grant Shihabi—who was born and raised in Dubai and is of Saudi Arabian, Norwegian, Palestinian, German, and Haitian descent—a place in NYU’s Tisch graduate program. Originally, she’d wanted to go to Juilliard, and bad; she saw a production of The Seagull directed by acting teacher Richard Feldman there and thought to herself, That’s the kind of actor I want to be. “Magically,” as she tells me from her parents’ home in Portugal one evening via Zoom, that very same teacher came to NYU to direct her class’ turn at the Anton Chekhov play. “It felt like, there is a god,” she adds. “Or some divine power.”

Years later, kismet arrived at her doorstep once more. After graduating from NYU in 2014, she’d made a name for herself as an actor, with appearances on Jack Ryan, Ramy, and the Netflix series Altered Carbon. While working on the latter series, the executives on the show told her they’d bought the rights to an upcoming, unnamed project she’d “actually be perfect for,” Shihabi remembers. The following year, she received the script for another Netflix series called Archive 81. “I was like, This is the best thing I’ve been sent in a long time,” she recalls. “The pilot’s incredible. I texted my friend who was an exec on Altered Carbon. I asked who was behind the show.” Turns out, it was the very series she’d been told about in 2019.

After not one, not two, but three false starts in which other actors were cast in Archive 81, Shihabi finally nabbed the starring role of Melody Pendras in the series, which debuts on January 14. (Throughout this entire grueling process, she notes that she “had this weird feeling that the part would come back around, that the casting director would call me and be like, it’s yours.”)

Archive 81, co-produced by Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Boys) and adapted from a podcast of the same name, is a horror-slash-thriller that centers Melody and an archivist named Dan, played by Mamoudou Athie, in parallel narratives. Dan, an employee at the Museum of the Moving Image in modern-day Queens, New York, is assigned the task of reviving damaged videotapes filmed by Melody, a grad student, back in 1994. In the footage, Melody discusses work she’s planning on doing at an East Side apartment building named the Visser, which Dan finds out burned down the very same year that Melody began recording the tapes. While both characters attempt to get to the bottom of the story behind the building, they become increasingly wrapped up in its mysterious origins.

Although this is Shihabi’s first time in a top billing spot, it’s far from her first rodeo. And frankly, to attribute her acting chops or past gigs to pure luck would be an unfair misrepresentation of her career thus far. Shihabi got her start as a dancer, joining Sharmila Kamte’s dance company in Dubai at the age of 12. “I went home the night after my first dance class and told my Arab parents, ‘I’m gonna be a professional dancer,’” she recalls. “When I left the room, my dad immediately told my mom, ‘Fuck no, that won’t happen.’” Shihabi, who grew up Muslim, says her mother, who was raised in the south of France, “fought my battles behind the scenes for me.”

“Growing up in Dubai, which is a Muslim Arab country, was amazing—I love my culture so much. There’s so much beauty to it,” Shihabi says. “But there’s also a lot of expectation and restrictions to be one sort of girl I was expected to be—not by my parents, who are remarkable people and allowed me to be whoever I wanted to be. But culturally, there are expectations that make you feel boxed in: really polite and sweet and with an expected submissiveness. And when I walked into that dance class, it was the first time I ever felt like I had space to be myself.”

For three years, she danced nonstop—until the family moved to Lebanon, where Shihabi dabbled in acting. “This acting bug was ignited, and I was so set on the idea that I could do both,” she says. At 18 years old, she moved to New York City in pursuit of her double-career. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan in the morning, and performed at Broadway Dance Center at night. “My first job was as a dancer on SNL—I would do digital shorts with Andy Sandberg,” Shihabi tells me brightly.

While recounting her personal history, the actress’ stories are peppered with memories of gigs, side hustles, late-night shows, and getting up early in the morning to do it all again. It’s clear her tenacity and work ethic—combined with that very special bit of luck—has gotten her this far. “Dance taught me a discipline,” she says. “When you’re a dancer, you have to dance every day. You have to be committed to it completely. I think I have that mentality when it comes to acting. I give it the same kind of discipline.”

There’s one more story Shihabi tells me before signing off in which the career gods were kind to her. Once the actress got the role in Archive 81 and found out who her costars were going to be, she realized Athie, who plays Dan, was someone she’d known since she was 18 years old. They auditioned for Juilliard and NYU at the same time, went through the whole process together. He attended the American Conservatory around the same time she did. And they met at a house party in New York City as youngsters.

“To do this with him felt really special,” she says of Archive 81’s full-circle feeling. “Acting together felt quite emotional, I think, for both of us.”

Netflix Debuts Horror Series ‘Archive 81’

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Friday, January 14, 2022

ABC

8:00 p.m. “Shark Tank”

9:00 p.m. “20/20” (two hours)

CBS

8:00 p.m. “Undercover Boss”

9:00 p.m. “Magnum P.I.

10:00 p.m. “Blue Bloods”

NBC

8:00 p.m. “The Wall”

9:00 p.m. “Dateline” (two hours)

Fox:

8:00 p.m. “WWE Friday Night Smackdown!”

CW:

8:00 p.m. “Penn & Teller: Fool Us”

9:00 p.m. “Nancy Drew”

PBS:

8:00 p.m. “Washington Week”

8:30 p.m. “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover”

9:00 p.m. “Stars on Stage From Western Country Playhouse”

10:00 p.m. “In Concert at the Hollywood Bowl” (R)

Of Note on Cable or Digital:

-“The Expanse” (Amazon, 12:01 a.m. ET): season finale

-“Archive 81” (Netflix, 3:01 a.m. ET): series premiere

-“After Life” (Netflix, 3:01 a.m. ET): series finale

-“The Cabin Chronicles” (Discovery+, 3:01 a.m. ET): season premiere

-“Home Sweet Home” (Peacock, 3:01 a.m. ET): series finale

-“The House” (Netflix, 3:01 a.m. ET): series premiere

-“King of the Con” (Discovery+, 3:01 am. ET): series premiere

-“Secrets Of Sulphur Springs” (Disney, 8 p.m. ET): season premiere