Navigating the global streaming landscape for new mysteries
And our adventures in tracking down Nine Puzzles
Last week, as we very reluctantly started a month of Hulu/Disney+, we experienced an unexpected pang of nostalgia for ad-riddled “free” network TV of old via which we used to watch the likes of Criminal Minds on CBS and Law & Order on NBC.
The issue was that we had been trying to minimize the number of subscriptions we carried since, like everyone else, we have too often found ourselves frustrated that we were still incurring automated credit card charges for services we hardly ever use but forgot that we were still paying for. Years of very expensive cable for a TV that we never turned on. Going on to a decade of not using our internet phone Ooma since we only use cellphones now—and our landline phone batteries have all died anyway. Gym membership which I used twice in two years. Britbox which we belatedly canceled after we realized that the content we actually wanted there was available elsewhere as well. I can go on and on.
But…. While we have been trying to keep down the number of streaming services we pay for to just three—Netflix (which is the service we most actively utilize), Amazon Prime (since we have it anyway for ordering too many items we don’t actually need), and PBS (mostly as donation)—we have periodically needed to register for more. For instance, we added Acorn for a while since that was the only place we could see Dalgliesh (which I’ve written about here); and ours is one of the four devices allowed to use my sister’s Viki Pass Plus account for Asian content we cannot access elsewhere. And we might have to dip back into Britbox if we want to see the latest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero (which looks nothing like the novel I read if the trailer is anything to go by).
Despite our best efforts, there are times—and last week was one of those—when I discovered the limits to our self-imposed diet of no more than three streaming services at a time. The fact is that I needed to watch Nine Puzzles for professional and for personal reasons. Professional because this series happens to relate to my current research project, personal because we have discovered that Korean drama series have become quite addictive.
Nine Puzzles revolves around a young profiler—who also happens to be the prime suspect for her uncle’s murder 10 years earlier—teaming up with the police officer who still believes she was the culprit in that long-ago murder. It features a serial killer, psychological gamesmanship, a host of suspicious characters, and two leads who more resemble “real” people than the too-beautiful-to-find-believable casts of many Korean drama series.
However, given that this show was too recent (and too foreign?) to have made its way onto the DVD aisles of our local public library, where to find it?
Since we get part of our Netflix bill subsidized by T-Mobile, we tried to see if one of our various monthly service fees already included—hopefully in full!—Hulu/Disney+. Alas no. T-Mobile gave us access to AppleTV, but that’s not what we needed. One of our credit cards advertised its generous inclusion of a streaming service…. but that too turned out to be AppleTV. (Why can’t they spread the wealth?)
So, we searched for other ways to stream this show. In addition to Rakutan Viki, we have used Kocowa and Roku Channel before for Asian series. And we successfully saw all 16 episodes of the South Korean remake of Life on Mars (originally a British series) on Bilibili (a Chinese platform). I am now watching a series—again for research—on Tubi as well (though with ads which are quite annoying).
But probably because it just premiered in May 2025 on Hulu/Disney+, I could not find a reliable way to stream Nine Puzzles for free. Various Youtube posts had ads constantly popping up off screen; uploads from Dailymotion, essentially a French Youtube, featured full episodes that were dubbed into English (which is not my preferred mode of viewing foreign shows), or subtitled into Japanese (which did not help either of us).
That brought us to the painful but obvious realization that if I wanted to watch Nine Puzzles—which I decided must happen, just in case it was helpful for my project (which it might be!)—we did really need to pay up: Either $10.99 a month to watch with ads or $19.99 without ads. We agreed that we’d limit our viewing to just one month, pretend we went to a matinee at the movie theater, and extravagantly plunked down the twenty bucks to go without ads.
Now we need to find a way to also squeeze in as many episodes as we can of The Bear (is it worth the hype?) before our paid-up month runs out in the last week of August. And of course, if there are must-watch mysteries on Hulu/Disney+, please let me know before we cancel our subscription!
I haven't seen the mentioned shows but I wanted to point you toward 'Under a Dark Sun' (Soleil Noir) a French mystery on Netflix. Twisted and twisty! I liked it.
I feel your pain! I just cancelled Acorn, started a one wk free subscription to Britbox 5 weeks ago to watch an entertaining crime series called Ludwig, with my daughter (we're both detective/mystery junkies.) Ludwig is a character somewhere between Monk and Professor T. Was about to cancel Britbox when we got hooked on the original Prime Suspect with Helen Mirren!
I'm looking forward to watching Korean Life on Mars. Thank you!
We watched the American version when it was on network TV (2008). Quite good.