What the best found-footage stories all have in common that Archive 81 misses

polygon.com:

Archive 81 opens on a woman begging into the camera, frantically making her plea through the distortion spat out by a mid-’90s camcorder. The frame is cramped. There are flickers and black lines of noise. We are primed, in this moment, for a series that’s in touch with the limitations of old media and the things that may hide in its flickering crevices. The footage in question is ostensibly part of an anthropological project on residents of the Visser apartment building, and it’s being restored by analog enthusiast Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) at the behest of a shifty benefactor. He has to do it at a remote facility because the tapes are too damaged to transport, burned in a fire that destroyed the Visser.

The woman is Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), the grad student responsible for much of the footage. At first, we only see her through the grainy video she shot, in sharp contrast to the crisp, present-day scenes of Dan fiddling with his tools, unspooling tape and taking cartridges apart with his gloved hands. As the series goes on and Dan fixes and then digitizes the tapes one by one, he learns what she learned: The Visser plays host to a supernatural cult.

But before that, Archive 81 does something unexpected. Not halfway into the first episode, we unceremoniously leave the confines of Melody’s viewfinder and watch her point the camera around a New York City street. The found-footage conceit melts away, the crummy picture quality traded for a past whose clarity hardly differs from the show’s color-desaturated present. It’s a contrast that’s jarring in all the wrong ways, indicative of the show to come: a story bursting with evocative potential that largely misses the opportunity to use its multiple forms of media to