Murder She Comitted

As a student there comes a time when your brain abandons all hope, miss-spells his name as Brian and moves to the Andes - at which point you find yourself suddenly enjoying daytime television.

Murder She Wrote has been on the air for many a year, as evidenced by the grainy quality of the filming and the near 80s style of filming, where if someone is in a building, an establishing shot of, say, the hospital will be taken, and then just to make sure we know what room our characters are in, a mad, head-first zoom towards that room will deliver us to where we need to be. Friends uses this as well, which is why it has always seem so disgustingly dated.

Every episode follows much the same pattern. Mrs. Fletcher (our elderly protagnist whose keen wit defies her age, as does her smart dress sense) turns up in another exotic location or holiday locale alongside just a handful of what must be a world network of friends. The characters, whatever their names are, follow much the same pattern. There is inevitably a lovely young lady in the group playing the role of 'the real victim in all this', who was just so darn naive she didn't know the new man she was about to marry was such a pig. Said pig, played by a strapping young gent, is usually our first suspect, but despite his being an undebatable pig, it just wasn't him in the end. He has no scruples, but he plays the role of 'well I may have done [blank], but I AIN'T the murderer, lady'. This role can also be played by some harlet or money-grabbing wife, but she ain't the murderer either, lady. Of course there's the decent crime solving man of experience. Needless to say he's not the murderer, but could sure do with some guidance from Mrs. Fletcher. In fact in all this Mrs. Fletcher either guides those who need her help or comforts those affected by the murders. Thank God that she turns up at these hot spots to help everyone out, I mean, what would they do if she weren't there!?

Well, in my opinion, they would live.

Doesn't it seem a LIT-tle too convenient that every time someone dies, Mrs. Fletcher just happens to be there, and then thanks to her 'CRIME SOLVING' (crime committing) and 'CLUE FINDING' (clue planting) some other poor sucker (usually some fat guy playing the role of 'I could have had a million bucks thanks to this deed to the old mine, if it hadn't been for you, lady') goes straight to jail. All the loose ends are tied up, and Mrs. Fletcher gets into a cab, goes to the airport and flies to some other exotic location (given the time frame it's usually an eighties status spot like Alpen or Haiwii) and goes on to commit, sorry, solve another murder, which she wasn't expecting, and neither was anyone else.
And isn't it just a little bit suspicious that she writes ingenius murder mysteries for a living? Yes, alright, that might make her the ideal person to solve a murder, but doesn't it also make her the ideal candidate to commit a murder as well? I mean, who would have managed to think of all the funny, weird tiny details that she spots, her, or the brutish park keeper, or the snooty banker, the dullard peroxide blonde wife? Line them up, and the others pale in comparison.
And she does SO, MUCH, GUESS WORK. She jumps to conclusions from nowhere! She simply approaches the supposed villain, says something like "oooh, but you were there Jim - because I noticed that Amanda's left shoe lace had been untied the moment she got off that bus, and the steleto that you murdered her with didn't have laces, and it was red. And I'll bet that if you check that brand of gum you're using, it's spearmint, not sugar free like her bodyguard was using. You almost had me fooled along with everyone else, until I had a hunch that Amanda's scuba-diving instructor had been a Romanian, and I recalled seeing that you had a Romanian dictionary in your glove compartment that day we went to see the variety show..." - and so on in that fashion, until the poor sap just gives up. Who'd argue with such an authorative yet gentle old woman? No one, and that's why she always gets away with it. Murder she wrote? More like murder she fucking committed.

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The simple reason I love this program though is because of the end music. I'm very happy to sit calmly for an hour watching all of the characters operate in the heated fall-out of a violent murder (which we of course never see, because it's 2 in the afternoon and I'm having my lunch). Emotions never seem to run very high in Murder She Wrote, despite a person having recently died. It's almost like watching an episode of Cluedo, only no one really wants to play and instead they'd rather be watching The Wire, which knows how to murder people properly. Anyway, at the end of the hour long show, the characters, the victims and the audience get a sense of closure on the gruesome and horrible chainsaw murder that befell an elderly man - WHICH IS MET WITH A LAUGHING FREEZE FRAME AND A CHEERY LITTLE TINKLE ON THE PIANO! Ye-ah-cha-cha-, ye-ah-cha-cha, a man's dead but plinky-plonk-on-the-piano, cha cha cha! How fun! It makes murder a child's play thing. Murdering people's SO light hearted and fun, we should do this every week! And so they did. It's on everyday on BBC1 at 2:15pm.