Gilbert, a sunshine in human form, is the silly and seldom wise true crime podcaster from America who’s out of his depth in Bodkin. Will Forte plays the character in the Netflix series.
As a true crime podcaster who is interested more in telling the story, rather than go around digging into the truth, Gilbert does things by the book.
He doesn’t want to dupe the people into recording their bytes and doesn’t want to violate any journalistic ethics.
However, being the complex, multifaceted character that he is, he doesn’t exactly uphold these ethics in any consistent manner.
The past mistake
Gilbert considers himself a one-hit wonder. He had a roaring success with his podcast once.
His wife Amber had cancer, and to cope with their battle, he sort of ended up taking all the intimate and most difficult parts of the worst time in their lives and making them public.
It was a grand success and people tuned in. However, his wife eventually recovered from cancer.
What was left was an awkward quotient. She obviously didn’t approve of the one-sided way in which her husband ended up publicizing her story. She felt exposed. Their marriage was never the same again.
Broke & divorced
After the resounding success of his first rodeo, Gilbert put all his money into the podcast but the success eluded him now. Broke and in debt, he can’t keep themselves economically afloat, much less socially safe.
Amber is tired and after a lot of calls that Gilbert hangs up, she comes to Bodkin herself. She tells him it’s over between them, asking him to sign the divorce papers.
He protests but when she insists he listens for once, he does realize that their marriage can’t be saved. He signs the papers and is officially divorced.
An ambiguous path ahead
Gilbert lies, cheats, and manipulates people into getting his audio for the podcast. He becomes greatly proficient in sneakily recording the crucial revelations as they unfold all of a sudden and out of nowhere.
Bodkin throws one peril after another his way. At first, he racks up £8000 in debt while drunk and gambling at the bar. The hippie called Frank gives him a lot of grief until Seamus helps with that issue.
This leads to a greater peril, as Seamus is an infamous smuggler and a killer as well. Before the end of the first season, Gilbert manages to escape death by explosion.
He overcomes his drive to make another hit podcast, which would amount to nothing but violating so many ethics and compromising vulnerable people’s trauma and grief.
He throws his recorder in the water and leaves Bodkin, for another story, hopefully a better one and something where no one dies. Other than that, he’s got no idea what he’d do next.