Murder, She Wrote
Tv shows or movies that would transition well to Sci-Fi elements being added?
- Thread starter Jayson1
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That’s more of a Horror show. Bodies dropping left and right.
How many times did that happen on Perry Mason?
Kind of like how Monk must have come into possession of a cursed amulet where he wished to be able to solve all murders and the side effect is everybody he passes on the street gets murdered.
Some premises are just more logical as single stories than ongoing series. "Mystery novelist stumbles across actual murder and uses her skills to solve it" is a great premise for a movie or novel, but the more you repeat it, the more contrived it gets. Still, that kind of "cozy mystery" series isn't meant to be realistic, but formulaic and comfortable.
Really, just about any episodic series is implausible in the frequency with which the characters encounter danger. Realistically, a cop or a starship crew or whatever would have a bunch of mostly routine, uneventful assignments with maybe a few significant crises per year. Going right from one disaster to another to another -- and always being just as psychologically fit from week to week rather than deeply traumatized by the constant ordeals -- just isn't believable. But it's a necessary conceit of episodic storytelling. And if anything, modern serialization makes it worse, because the episodes are usually written as happening right after each other with no downtime to recover in between them. Plus there's the added contrivance of how the cases of the week always happen to resonate perfectly with whatever personal drama the main characters are wrestling with that week.
Not to mention that, given that much of these shows ran 30 episode seasons, I doubt they expected people to remember the episodes much by the end of the seasons. But with the advent of binging, the frequency becomes much more obvious as they weren't meant to stand up to scrutiny. I'm currently re-watching Highway to Heaven with my parents and I noticed in the 2nd season alone, they had already repeated a similar storyline and concept that they had done in Season 1. I have to say, I'm kind of glad we've mostly gone away from long broadcast style seasons. I much prefer having shorter seasons with stronger writing.
True, but we've also gone too far in the other direction. Serial seasons have their own shortcomings, like the way they routinely revolve around vast conspiracies, because you need to have some big twist or reveal in each episode, and if every episode is about the same story, then it ends up having to be a story about a massive, twisty conspiracy with a lot of secrets.
But that's just it -- why should we have to choose only one? Fiction should do all sorts of different things. There should be a range of everything from pure episodic shows to purely serial shows and everything in between. Doing everything the same way is dumb. Heck, even in the days when pure episodic dramas were standard in prime-time TV, there were still plenty of fully serialized daytime soap operas, and sometimes nighttime soaps. Not to mention miniseries, some of which were as long as a modern streaming-show season.
In general, TV has become progressively less versatile over the decades. It used to be that TV movies were a regular thing, and some shows were 90 minutes, and in the early days of TV there was even room for shows that ran 15 minutes or 75 minutes. Now everything is either an hour or a half-hour, and we never even see 2-hour pilot episodes anymore. There used to be miniseries on a regular basis alongside all the episodic shows; now almost every TV season is somewhere in between those two formats. And some formats of programming have become less common, like anthologies, daytime soap operas, or sketch-comedy/musical variety shows.
Oh, definitely. Like, if the general story itself isn't very good, it could potentially affect every episode, That's a definite downside when your whole season revolves around a specific story. But yep, definitely get you on the conspiracies. At some point, one wonders just how many conspiracies there are, and it tends to be less realistic.
I thought Blindspot was going to reveal a sci-fi element to the tattoos because of how impossibly precise they are and also the impeccable timing, but nope. They're just that needlessly complicated and insanely accurate. Even after Roman had his memory wiped, he could still make new ones.
Murder, She Wrote reminds me of when I met Rene Auberjonois. I asked him if he'd been offered Father Mulcahy in the series, and he said "Yes. We all were." He turned it down because, as he said, "It would have been my life." I finally figured out what he meant by that, and Murder, She Wrote is an integral element of it.
After M*A*S*H (and AfterMASH) ended, William Christopher went on with his career, at one point doing an episode of Murder, She Wrote. He did a brilliant job portraying a nosy busy-body type (no spoilers!), and one would expect it would have been well received. No such luck. He got hate mail for playing a role so far removed from Father Mulcahy, and MSW got hate mail for having him play such a character, when "he's not that kind of person." William Christopher ended up doing primarily stage-work, at times exclusively, just to be able to work and provide for his family, because this kind of reaction was commonplace.
After M*A*S*H (and AfterMASH) ended, William Christopher went on with his career, at one point doing an episode of Murder, She Wrote. He did a brilliant job portraying a nosy busy-body type (no spoilers!), and one would expect it would have been well received. No such luck. He got hate mail for playing a role so far removed from Father Mulcahy, and MSW got hate mail for having him play such a character, when "he's not that kind of person." William Christopher ended up doing primarily stage-work, at times exclusively, just to be able to work and provide for his family, because this kind of reaction was commonplace.
Odd, then, that he subsequently ended up accepting regular roles on at least two other series, Benson and Deep Space Nine. Although in the latter he had the advantage of being hidden under prosthetics.
Okay, I used to think the whole "Jessica Fletcher is really a clever serial killer" joke was funny when I came up with it decades ago (along with countless other viewers, no doubt), but I'm getting tired of how it's now apparently the one and only thing anyone ever has to say about Murder, She Wrote. It's not clever anymore, just predictable. Can't we think up a fresher joke to take its place? Like, maybe Cabot Cove was actually on a Hellmouth and that's why its per capita homicide rate was so staggering?
It was the target of a secret world depopulation program.
Cozy mysteries are supposed to be predictable. The formula is what makes them cozy. By the same token, episodic television in those days was mostly about providing a consistent, familiar experience from week to week.
That's why there are shows for different audiences with different tastes. It's easy to make fun of formulaic shows, but they wouldn't be so long-running if there weren't a lot of people they appealed to.
Besides, mysteries aren't about realistic win-loss records. They're brain teasers for the audience, puzzles you try to solve before the detective does. Naturally the detective has to get the right answer at the end so you can find out if you did too.
Except Perry still managed to reveal the real killer in "The Case of the Terrified Typist," because he figured out that
the convicted man was actually an impostor, so Perry's nominal client was still innocent.
Although there were a couple of episodes where Perry lost a civil case at the start, before getting into the murder case of the week.
I used to have it on as background noise, and just kind of half watched, and I was shocked when there actually was an episode where someone called her out on how she always stumbled into murders, and how half of her family was accused of murder at one point or another.
My mom is very good at this, and it drives me crazy at times, she can usually figure out who the killer is within 10 or 15 minutes, and she's almost always right.
It kind of gets weird when a recurring character on a semi arc-based show goes from helping to solve a case in one episode to being caught up in one as a suspect. Or that a regular not only becomes a suspect once, but twice for entirely different issues.
Which is why I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle intentionally left himself an out to bring Sherlock Holmes back by having his "death" at Reichenbach Falls go unwitnessed, only surmised from context.
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I remember the episode where they were dolls and trapped in her goth roommates dollbox. I think I had long given up the show by the last season though.
I remember the episode where they were dolls and trapped in her goth roommates dollbox. I think I had long given up the show by the last season though.