Podcast Review | Maddie
A Surprisingly Long Wait
While it seems like there has been a podcast about nearly every crime that has ever occurred, it has been a surprisingly long wait for an entire podcast series focusing on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Maddie is brought to us by 9podcasts in Australia. The series focuses on the lingering questions from the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in May 2007.
The McCann case remains one of the biggest unsolved missing persons case the world has ever known. When Madeleine first went missing, the entire world was fixated on the small Portuguese town of Praia da Luz.
With camera crews and reporters from across the world decamped to this small town for months on end in 2007, and with frequent news reports on the likes of CNN and Sky News, this was the biggest story in the world. While the story eventually faded out of the world’s view, for people in Britain and across Europe the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was still frequently mentioned in newspapers every day for well over a year.
12 Years Later
Now, 12 years since Madeleine first went missing, people may have forgotten a lot of the complexities of the investigation. In the six episodes that have aired so far, Maddie has gone back through the case detail by detail, beginning on the night of May 3rd when Madeleine was taken from her family’s apartment.
Although there are snippets of new information in the podcast for people who followed the case closely when it first occurred, a lot of the podcast is spent going over old information that there was a lot of focus on when the media frenzy into Madeleine’s disappearance was at its height.
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The tagline for Maddie claims to make you question everything you thought you knew about the case. However, the constant distancing of Kate and Gerry McCann from any wrongdoing related to the disappearance of their daughter makes you feel like perhaps you’re not allowed question every single aspect of the case.
Netflix’s The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann and Maddie
With the release of the Netflix documentary The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann a few weeks after Maddie began airing, the story of Madeleine McCann has become one of the most discussed pop culture topics yet again.
While the podcast may not be for everyone, it is much better than the Netflix documentary, which decides to focus on the Portuguese police and the Algarve region at random points in the story for long periods of time, when that could have been all discussed in a quick 15-minute roundup.
The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann also brings no new information to the table and it seems like it was solely made to capitalise on the success of the binge-worthy true crime documentary series that has become a unique selling point for Netflix over the past few years.
Maddie, on the other hand, has a clear focus in its retelling of the story week by week, while gaining new information and new sources along the way. It may even lead to someone coming forward and reigniting the investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance. While this may seem unlikely, the success of another Australian podcast, The Teacher’s Pet, has helped police solve a crime that many believed would never be solved.
However, at the end of the day Maddie is podcast about a tragic event, focusing on a story that many have lost their emotional investment in as the years have gone on. Yet behind all the media scrutiny, police corruption and public intrigue, a little girl went missing on holiday and her family have been unable to find her ever since. Ultimately that is the real tragedy, and it is something that is too often forgotten.
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