Celebrity Spotlight: Terry Dunn Meurer
Today’s Celebrity Spotlight features Terry Dunn Meurer, the woman behind Unsolved Mysteries.
Terry Dunn Meurer is a household name who has spent many years working behind the scenes in Hollywood. She is best known for working on the long running, Emmy nominated series Unsolved Mysteries, which recently returned to Netflix and in the form of a podcast.
She once again is working with the show’s co-creator John Cosgrove, who is also a part of the Netflix series. Terry recently took time out of her very busy schedule to talk to TVGrapevine. Here are some of the highlights from our chat.
1. The podcast is very similar to the original show in the sense that it covers all the topics people love: missing persons, UFOs, wanted criminals and lost loves. Each topic is switched up with every episode, ensuring that there is truly something for every fan. Terry reiterates that this is a mystery show, not a true crime show, which is why they cover so many different topics.
2. Steve French, who serves as the host/narrator, was added to the podcast to give it the kind of feel the original series had with Robert Stack.
However, even though he is a major part of the show, Terry says that the actual people who are interviewed or experienced the event are the ones who are the key part of the show.
3. The podcast is NOT replacing the Netflix series. Instead, it is an addition to the series and a way to get more unsolved mysteries stories told. There are many mysteries that need to be solved, so this is a way to shine a light on other stories that have not made it to the series.
4. For Terry, the biggest challenge is to choose which mysteries to feature. They are only given so many episodes to produce, so it is hard to pick and choose which ones make it to air. She thinks every single one of them deserve to be shared and sadly more crimes and mysteries occur each day.
Another challenge with the podcast is that there are no visuals, so it is hard to let people know what the missing people or criminals look like.
5. She thinks that the reason the show is so iconic is because it has a mission and a purpose: to solve these cases and give answers to those searching. She knows people watching look for updates and they update the case files twice a year on the original series, which is streaming on Amazon Prime and other services. (In fact, two of the earliest cases were updated recently!)
As for updates, they will be added as necessary and fans can always go to unsolved.com to check out more updates on other cases.
6.The show initially evolved out of an HBO special that Terry did about missing children and adults. This was around the time of missing kids on milk cartons, which was another way to get media attention to missing children.
After that, they sold three episodes to NBC because they realized that the media could be a wonderful tool to help find missing people and bring criminals to justice.
Keep checking back for more Unsolved Mysteries news! Thank you for being a part of our Celebrity Spotlight, Terry Dunn Meurer.
