History Podcast / ThisSoundsSerious

* TooDumbToFool: Daniel was interrogated for eight hours without really implicating despite the detective's sometimes leading questions:

* SoBadItsGood: [[invoked]] [[spoiler:''Grand Casino'' turns out to be hilariously awful with stilted acting from the leads, nonsensical writing, non-stop cliffhangers and painfully obvious mistakes]]. The guys from ''[[ShowWithinAShow Rotten Popcorn]]'' place it in the same league as ''Film/TheRoom'' and ''Film/BattlefieldEarth''.

''This Sounds Serious'' is a parody of documentary-style true crime podcasts like ''Podcast/{{Serial}}'', created for Castbox by Kelly&Kelly. The first episode launched on May 1, 2018.

--> '''Weatherman Actor:''' Hey, what are you doing in my condo in Flagstaff, Arizona? ''[sounds of a struggle and the "weatherman" being strangled]'' You're strangling me! You're strangling a weatherman!

* DisappearedDad: Jimmy's father, country musician Gordon Robert Kline, is not very involved in his son's life anymore because the town of Tom Day is extremely alienating to outsiders like him; he specifically recalls an incident when he held baby Jimmy in his arms and people around them screamed in panic and said Jimmy was floating in mid-air, either pretending not to see Gordon or genuinely not noticing him. That said, he was heartbroken about having to leave his son and was devastated to learn that he had been sentenced to prison.

* ImStandingRightHere: When Gordon Kline was married to Rhoda and they were out in public together, townsfolk would happily talk to her while either ignoring or not noticing Gordon when he sat next to her; sometimes they even asked if she would be getting married soon.

* OrwellianRetcon: After the fiasco with ''Grand Casino'''s premiere, the studio went out of its way to pretend the project never existed, issuing a company-wide gag order; the movie doesn't even have a listing on Website/IMDb.

* WhoMurderedTheAsshole: InUniverse. With ''Emerald Motors'', Kirk and Blaine copied ''Series/{{Dallas}}''' "Who Shot J.R.?" mystery by having someone shot ''[[UpToEleven in every single episode]]''. According to the show's casting director, they shot 32 lead characters in the first season.

** After the bank hostage situation, the official story becomes that Jimmy didn't really know Melissa and that he just got her name from the news - except Gwen points out that Melissa didn't actually pop up in the news until a few days later when she was reported missing (her parents reported it late because of all the other towns she'd gone missing).
** When Gwen asks Rhoda why she wasn't reachable during the hostage situation, she says she was at a town council meeting and that those meetings drag on, they keep their phones turned off during them, that it was a long weekend and she left town afterwards and forgot to turn her phone on. However, Papa Don later says that Rhoda stopped bothering coming to town council meetings years ago.

* ShowWithinAShow: ''Rotten Popcorn'', a podcast where the two hosts {{MST}} and review bad movies. Gwen brings them in to [[spoiler:help her get a fresh set of eyes on ''Grand Casino'' when she gets her hands on a copy]].

* ShowWithinAShow: ''Here's Some Information'', a podcast about Internet culture. A substantial chunk of Episode 4, "Subcultures", is made up of its episode about the Smell subculture of which Jimmy was a member for a time.

* TheBadGuyWins: [[spoiler: Gwen figures out that “Daniel” is really Chuck, but cannot act on it because she has no authority. Chuck knows this and escapes scot-free.]]

* TheDogWasTheMastermind: Regarding the Weatherman Strangler case. The killer appears to have been [[spoiler:the Albuquerque police station janitor who figured out a cipher the killer had sent]], but because he died in a shootout with the police, his guilt was never fully confirmed.

* LighterAndSofter: The storyline of the season is less heavy than the previous season, in part because it focuses on a case of fraud rather than a murder.

-->'''John "JJ" Carlson:''' I could’ve sent two more [fingers] over the years, but I’ve learned to let it go.

* ChekhovsHobby: [[spoiler:In one of Chuck's old TV segments, he mentions loving horses and even owning one himself. This becomes a major hint for Gwen that he killed Daniel and took his place because Daniel now raises horses at his ranch despite not having any interest interest in them in the past]].

** PlayedForDrama later when Daniel tried to break up Chuck and his wife and when Daniel impersonated Chuck during an audition for a weatherman gig at a bigger network, costing him the job.

* FailureGambit: When Rhoda ran for mayor against the incumbent mayor, her father, he barely pretended to put up a serious campaign against her; at one rally, he showed up in a pajamas and robe and pretended that his mind was slipping.

* ShowWithinAShow: ''Last Known Whereabouts'', an ''Series/UnsolvedMysteries''-like TV show about strange, unsolved murder cases. It comes up in Episode 6 when Gwen talks about the Weatherman Strangler. Despite, or thanks to, its low budget and hokey reenactment scenes (all of which where done by the same actors), it has become something of a cult favorite among true crime fans.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: The fact that it was actually [[spoiler:Dan who died]] is foreshadowed by the stories of the pranks they used to play in school.

* GuiltByAssociation: After the scandal with Kirk and ''Grand Casino'', Blaine's work as a producer dried up because of his connection to Kirk, even though he himself didn't really have anything to do with the project and he was working on other, unrelated projects while Kirk was supposedly away making the movie.

--->'''Kirk:''' [[spoiler:Gwen, Isabelle died in a car crash years ago]].

* {{Expy}}: “Murder my Sweet” and its host, Deb Desouza, are a nod to ''Podcast/MyFavoriteMurder'' with Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff.

--> John "JJ" Carlson: I could’ve sent two more [fingers] over the years, but I’ve learned to let it go.

--> '''Ken Shaw''': We think of a news broadcast as a sandwich. The anchors are the bread--gotta have bread or it’s not a sandwich. Stories are the meat of the sandwich. Sports? I’m gonna say they’re tomatoes. Weather is supposed to be the lettuce--women like it, but nobody else does. It’s not too exciting, it’s crunchy. Suddenly, the lettuce is the reason for our news sandwich becoming popular? It doesn’t make sense. The difference was, our lettuce was young and cool and handsome. It was like if you found out a sandwich had Christian Slater lettuce. That make sense?

* TheDogWasTheMastermind: Regarding the Weatherman Strangler case. The killer appears to have been the Albuquerque police station janitor who figured out a cipher the killer had sent, but because he died in a shootout with the police, his guilt was never fully confirmed.

* {{Padding}}: [[invoked]] [[spoiler:''Grand Casino'' is two and a half hours long, and apparently quite a lot could have been cut; Gwen specifically notes a scene where one lead teaches the other how to parallel park]].

* PoorCommunicationKills: As it turns out, various investigative agencies had parts of the story figured out, but because they were bad at sharing information, they never discovered that [[spoiler:Helen Chatham worked on the production of ''Grand Casino'' using a fake identity]].

** The two supposed leads of ''Grand Casino'', Vincent Carlyle and Isabelle Broussard; the former because he had been was a known drunk who could be easily deceived by Kirk, and the latter because she was naive and had no movie experience and wouldn't know how a movie set was supposed to be run.

* TheAlcoholic: ''Grand Casino'''s supposed leading man, Vincent Carlyle, admits in his autobiography to have had such a drinking problem at the time (mainly on [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slice_(drink) Slice]]-based sangria) that he didn't remember a lot of his work during that period and just played along.

* PaperThinDisguise: "Alison," a survivor of The Mandala, agreed to speak with Gwen on the condition that her real name would not be used. Her real name is “Allison,” pronounced the same.

* SerialKiller: A suggested suspect in Chuck's murder is The Weatherman Killer, a serial killer in the early 2000s who killed weathermen who made incorrect predictions about heat waves ending.