Netflix’s Archive 81 is based on a popular scripted podcast that involves two timelines and some supernatural goings on. Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) is an expert archivist that works for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. His specialty is taking videotape that’s been either damaged or has deteriorated due to adverse storing conditions and retrieving what’s been recorded on them. His current project is trying to recover a pre-Twilight Zone TV series that was sitting in someone’s basement for decades. But his boss gives him a project from a “big donor” for him to work on. When he restores the tape, he sees two young women in an apartment. One of them, Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi) is about to move into an apartment building called The Visser. Her goal is to talk to the residents there for her anthropology dissertation. Dan looks up the Visser; it burned down in 1994, leaving 13 people missing. He does such a good job on the tape, he’s called to the office of the mysterious client, Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan). Donovan wants him to restore the rest of the tapes in their possession. He’ll have to do it at a bunker in the Catskills and has to keep the contents top secret. The pay is $100,000. When Virgil mentions that he knows that Dan’s family died in a fire when he was a kid, Dan freaks out over the fact that he knows something that isn’t public knowledge.