Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery is a podcast created by Hartlife NFP, creators of Our Fair City.
Lily Harper moves to the small town of Mount Absalom, Ohio, to help look after her estranged mother, Dot. Staying at Fenwood House, the boarding house owned by her family for generations, Lily discovers ghosts, conspiracies, and the strange secrets of the town.
This show contains examples of:
- Affably Evil: Silas has several polite interactions with Lily, and offers her both advice and brandy at different points, despite being someone Lily's family has been trying to keep at bay for generations.
- Agent Scully: Abbie typically takes a more skeptical approach to any possible supernatural occurrences, though they gradually warm to the idea of the supernatural existing in Mount Absolom.
- Amicable Exes: Dot and Dale, Lily's parents, still get on well after their divorce.
- Ancient Order of Protectors: The Delphic Order seem itself as this.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Rudy. Talks to an imaginary class to work through his ideas, but is a very good astronomer.
- Christmas Episode: 'Hark' is something of a Twisted Christmas episode, with Dot sundowning as Abbie, the only tenant in Fenwood during Christmas, does their best to manage.
- Close-Knit Community: Everyone in town knows and seems genuinely fond of one another, for the most part.
- The Conspiracy: The Delphic Order.
- Continuity Nod:
- In season three's The Sound of Her Voice, Lily uses the same calm method of dealing with a kitchen fire that Wes uses in season one's The Diner.
- In Solid Citizens, Lily, Dot, and Abbie discuss possible supernatural things about Wes that occurred in previous episodes.
- Abbie's celery jingle, which won the contest, can be heard on the radio in Night Shift. Wes hums part of his jingle during Theodore.
- Cool Old Lady: Dot Harper.
- Cute Ghost Girl: Joey, and possibly young Lily.
- A Day in the Limelight: Rudy, Abbie, and Wes all get episodes that focus on them.
- Dead All Along: Wes.
- Ensemble Cast: While season one focuses mainly on Lily, season two onwards starts giving equal focus on Abbie and Rudy, and season three giving equal attention to Wes.
- Friendly Ghost: Many of the ghosts of Mount Absalom are friendly, or at least benign.
- Genius Loci:
- Fenwood House can communicate using the radiators, and as of season five it can move its own rooms around.
- Mount Absalom, possibly.
- Good Parents:
- Dale and Cynthia for Lily. Dot tried to be, but didn't quite succeed.
- Wes's parents.
- Ghost Amnesia: Wes only begins remembering his past life in season three, and still struggles to remember everything.
- Halloween Episode: 'The Graveyard Shuffle' from season two, which even has three Halloween Songs created by the writers: "Do the Trick Or Treat", "My Boyfriend is a Jack O’Lantern", and "The Graveyard Shuffle".
- Haunted House: Fenwood is a benign example, for the most part.
- Intergenerational Friendship: Dot and Wes.
- Killed Off for Real: Rudy.
- The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Or diner, in this case.
- The Lonely Door: The door that sometimes appears in the basement of Fenwood House.
- Missing Child: Season four episode 'Tighten the Ropes' has Jamie Warren go missing for most of the episode, with the adults around him - and his parents especially - growing increasingly worried.
- No Name Given:
- Mark Soloff's character, the Old Man with the monster-dogs, is left unnamed until the season two finale, often credited simply with garbled radio noises.
- The proprietor and waitress from Hunter's Diner also have their names in the credits covered by static.
- The Order: The Delphic Order, a secret society dedicated to keep Silas Lodge out of the town.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: There are several ghosts living in Mount Absalom, including:
- Norah, who haunts the observatory where she died, has limited corporeality, and can recreate every sound made in the observatory since three days after her death.
- Theodore Wesley, who can eat and move about normally freely within Mount Absalom, but who wasn't aware he was dead.
- Great Uncle Tim, whose ghost initially disappeared after his partner Grant died, but who can be found in the Hunter's building under certain circumstances.
- And then there's the reveal in series four that the ghosts are not ghosts but instead memory echoes.
- Pumpkin Person: Referenced in one of the songs played in The Graveyard Shuffle.
- Parents as People: Dot. She clearly loves Lily, but the two have a strained relationship at times, especially at the beginning.
- Prequel in the Lost Age: "The Poplars of Soissons", a one-off special about a grieving French explorer who encounters the moat in the cave and its ability to commune with the dead in the 1790s, before the town's foundation.
- Seen It All: Nothing fazes Dot about the weirdness of Mount Absolom.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Dot Harper is responsible for most of the swearing in the show.
- Sleazy Politician:
- Chester, who - for unknown reasons - is hellbent on taking the Fenwood House from Dot.
- Mayor Edgar Lopez, a much more realistic and toned-down version, who is extremely venal, overly concerned with his image, and seems to be just using his office as a stepping stone for the U.S Senate.
- Small Town Boredom: Lily saw Mount Absalom as too small and boring as a teenager, and has similar feelings when returning as an adult.
- Small-Town Tyrant: Chester Warren, a small-town bureaucrat who serves as the nominal leader of the Delphic Order, and possesses an absurd amount of jobs which he uses to control the town in subtle ways, such as extorting the Fenwood House through an archaic law classifying it as a brothel.
- Something Only They Would Say: A variant in season five. When Dot is faced with two Russell Epsteins, she asks them both what her first music record was. The fake Russell, an aspect of Fenwood, knows the real answer.
- The Stinger: The first two seasons have either a post-credits fact or a post-credit scene after each episode.
- Thanksgiving Episode: The episode 'The Broken Moat' takes place at Thanksgiving, complete with a big turkey dinner, feelings of togetherness, and stressful family relationships.
- Town with a Dark Secret: Besides the whole atmosphere of the place, there's an old man living in the woods with his two monster-dogs, an abandoned observatory built on top of another buried building, a few deceased citizens who have come back healthy, a 24-hour diner that appears out of nowhere with no health code compliance to speak of, and a horribly skewed local history pageant.
- Unfazed Everyman: Of all the three characters of the show that move to Mount Absolom, (Abbie, Lily, and Rudy) Rudy adapts to the supernatural perhaps the best - he willingly accepts the existence of ghosts and even befriends Norah easily, and frequently points out to Abby that there's no logical explanation for some of the things they've seen, like The Lonely Door that appears in the Fenwood House.
- Unreliable Expositor: Dot, while a lifelong resident of Mount Absolom, can't tell the main cast everything due to her alzheimers disease, which has gotten them into trouble a few times.
- Walking Spoiler: Wes, and the old man who lives in the woods.
- Wham Episode:
- Episode eleven of the second season. Rudy digs through the observatory floor to the structure below it. Lily is lowered down through the hole, which is around fifty feet deep, and hears ghostly voices. Wes panics after being told he is dead, and disappears.
- Episode eleven of season three, when Rudy dies.
- Wham Line: From the episode Hold On in season four:Silas: "I live here now. In Mount Absalom."
- Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer: Chester in The Farmhouse and the Flood when he brings Rudy's body to Fenhouse House so the Fenwood folk can pay their respects. He begins his prepared speech to convince them even after Lily says yes.
