Illusion of Words

Thoughts on ‘Murder, She Wrote’

“Murder, She Wrote” isn’t exactly a great series, but good enough for me to watch every weekday night at 11 pm, right on the dot. I first heard of the show long time ago during a piano lesson, when I came across the sheet music of the theme song. Of course, I had no idea whatsoever of the show.

The idea was kind of taken from Agatha Christie’s books about Miss Marple (personally, I prefer Hercule Poirot. The idea of an old lady solving mysteries does not seem quite so nice.. somehow). Anyhow, in case you have no idea, Angela Lansbury stars as the mystery writer Jessica Fletcher.

Now this J.B. Fletcher is pretty much bad luck itself when it comes to people dying. Everywhere she goes, you can be sure somebody drops dead. I remember there was even a survey done about the percentage of dead people in Cabot Cove, which is the fictional town where Jessica lives.

The show follows a pretty generic plot. Jessica goes somewhere, or something is happening as we follow some people’s story. Halfway through, a body is discovered. Give or take 10 minutes later, somebody is arrested, and that somebody is usually not the guilty one. Jessica puts on her thinking cap and gets random inspirations from people’s small talk, or something that she sees. Then towards the end of the show, Jessica puts herself in some extremely dangerous position to draw the murderer out, and just as the murderer pulls out a gun and is about the silence her for good, the police show up.

If you watch the show enough times, you’d know that the guilty one is usually the one appearing most innocent. However, you can be right most of the time to always rule out Jessica’s friends and the cute young couple. And the one who gets arrested by the usually dumb police. The killer is then just one of the other people.

It operates on the basis that the murderer is one of the group within the show, a very Agatha Christie-ish thing. Usually in Christie’s story, a murder happens within a house, and so the killer is one of the inhabitants - take your pick. “Murder, She Wrote” pretty much follows that. Jessica won’t be able to solve the mystery, most probably, if it were some random person. But as it happens, she is always caught up in a murder mystery.

Good that the killer is always caught, but does she always have to put herself in such a precarious situation in the end? True, it may be to gain undeniable proof of the killer’s identity, but it’s kind of block-headed, in my opinion. She could get killed, but of course she won’t. And the show will always end with a frozen frame of her mid-laugh.

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