David Farnor | On 20, Jul 2016

BBC Three is taking a leaf out of Serial and Netflix’s book with a new true crime series landing on the web all-at-once next week.

First announced earlier this year, Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared continues BBC Three’s aim to open up new ways to tell stories to viewers, with an innovative format built around eight short episodes, combined with a host of additional online material.

The show sees journalists Alys Harte and Bronagh Munro venture deep into the Isle of Wight’s dark underbelly to investigate the disappearance of 16-year-old Damien in November 1996. He went missing after a night out in the small town of Cowes. Nearly two decades later, his body has never been found and no-one has ever been charged. With so much about his disappearance still unknown, big questions remain…was Damien murdered? And if so, who was behind his death? And what happened to his body?

Unearthing evidence and sometimes conflicting accounts, Harte and Munro work closely with Damien’s family to find out what happened.

All Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared content will be published at once, allowing audiences to follow the investigation at their own pace and delve into supporting content, such as interactive maps, police interviews, missing people statistics and character profiles, as much as they want. The episodes themselves will last around 15 minutes each.

Adam Jessel, Executive producer for BBC TV current affairs, says: “Unsolved : The Boy Who Disappeared is the result of months of meticulous and dedicated work by the team.”

“We had to wade through almost twenty years of rumour, speculation and lies,” adds Harte. “Some stories have been retold so many times that they have become part of the mythology of the Isle of Wight. Deciphering fact from fiction was our greatest challenge.”

It follows a similar approach used for Love Triangle, BBC Three’s spin-off mini=series from Life and Death Row, which was released in daily installments in April 2016, including an array of supporting evidence.

“The investigation unfolds on the site as though we are armchair detectives looking at our very own noticeboard, adding more evidence as the days go by,” we wrote in our review of the series. “The result embraces the innovation made possible by BBC Three’s move online, creating suspense from daily cliffhangers and inviting us to pore over the evidence to discover for themselves the truth behind Heather Strong’s tragic and pointless death.”

It also arrives at a time when audiences are hungry once more for a true crime fix, following the announcement yesterday that Netflix has ordered new episodes of Making a Murderer.

Unsolved: The Boy Who Disappeared will be available at 10am from Monday 25th July.

For more on what’s coming soon to BBC Three, click here.

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