So I’ve spent most of January and February plagued with some kind of….plague. It’s horrible, but it does mean I get to catch up on all the TV I’ve missed in the past couple decades. I blew through New Tricks earlier, then I watched Murder in Suburbia (not bad, really, and I liked Ash, though I usually guessed who dunnit in the first ten minutes) and then, for reasons known only to itself, Netflix suggested I might like a garden gnome musical and I had to have a soothing lie down*.
When I came back, I was armed with another friend’s suggestion: Midsomer Murders. Supposed to be the best acting evah. Which actually it really kind of is. John Nettles, who plays the lead detective, can do more with his eyebrow than most actors can do when chewing the scenery and screaming.
The basic premise of the show is this: DCI Tom Barnaby is a police detective in Midsomer, a pretend county in England that’s filled with picturesque but extremely violent villages. Barnaby always has a sergeant or factotum. In the early series, it’s Sergeant Troy, a handsome young man with even fewer brains than Barnaby. I quite like Troy, even if he is rather homophobic and kind of a jerk at times, he’s very kind and has a good heart. Troy eventually grows up to be his own detective and after five or so years, we get another sergeant, Dan Scott, who is a city-slicker lower-class modern-thinking twatwaffle. Er. Not that I dislike him or anything. Fortunately, Scott is eventually replaced by a much nicer, quite brilliant extremely kind, canny, and earnest Ben Jones, who started as a beat cop and got drafted by Barnaby.
So a crime will happen and then Barnaby will show up with his assistant and begin detecting. In between detecting (and sometimes during), we’ll occasionally get glimpses of Barnaby’s wife, Joyce, and adult daughter, Cully. Joyce is a gourmand who can’t cook and has a passionate love of acting and art. She’s got a kind heart and often is volunteering in various causes to save the world. Cully is an actress, but she has a bit more of her dad’s practical streak.
The charm of this show is in the setting and characters, the absurd cottage cozy murder plots, and in the fine wordplay. This is not a show to watch if you’re looking for realism in your motivations and villainy. It’s not about that. It’s also not about accurate police procedures–during most shows, Barnaby shows up to talk to important witnesses, who nearly always are:
- Conveniently called away on the phone, by a visitor or relative, or realize they’re late for an appointment. If I was the copper, I’d say, “Look, this is murder. You can be late to the annual orchid grower society meeting. Answer my questions fully or I’ll haul you to the nick.” Barnaby nearly always lets them go, and they’re often killed before their next appointment with him.
- Extremely shifty, to even the most oblivious eye. “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” Suspect’s eyes dart around the room, “At home. Alone. Watching telly.” Does Barnaby ever ask what they were watching, to see if he can catch them in a lie? No, he does not.
- Basically barking mad. (Practically everyone on the show is.) “I couldn’t have been murdering anyone! I was preparing for the annual bell-ringing competition and nothing can get in the way of that!”
- Standing in their living rooms, in pub common rooms, or in the center of a church aisle, surrounded by other interested listeners. It’s not unusual for him to question several people, in a group, at the same time. “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” he’ll ask the husband. “We were watching telly together. We had a quiet night in, didn’t we, dear?” says the wife. And her husband will nod. Even though the wife was out shagging the vicar and the husband was practicing skeet shooting. Or murdering someone. Only at the end of the show does Barnaby ever notice that this might not be the Best Interrogation Technique Evah. And since he asks the questions in public places, there’s always convenient eavesdroppers who can tattle to the village gossip or the local murderous fiend. Or who are the local murderous fiend.
It doesn’t do great things for Barnaby’s detecting, but it does up the body count, which is part of the fun.
Most of these shows have a pile of corpses at the end. A murderer will thwap someone to death with a shovel over a thousand year blood feud and then have to kill six other people to cover it up. Nobody’s ever a serial killer, although there are occasionally people who suffer fits of hereditary madness which drives them to various Foul Deeds.
So I’ve burbled on about how silly the detecting is, but let me give a glimpse of the charm of the show (because honestly, it does have plenty of charm!).
So as not to spoil lots and lots of episodes, we’ll start with the pilot, which should give everyone a decent feel of the show. It begins with two aged spinsters who compete to see who can find a Super Special Sekrit Orchid (I told you-flowers are dangerous!) in the local woods. Whichever one of them discovers the orchid proves it by marking it with a stake and then taking a photograph. Spinster One, whose name I have already forgotten, bicycles out to the woods with her basket and camera and special stakes. While out there, she finds the orchid, and while photographing it, discovers something shocking.
She races home, slams the door, makes two short phonecalls, and then dies. Suspiciously. Her friend and neighbor, Spinster Two, tells DCI Barnaby that it couldn’t have been an accident and that it was murder. Dun, dun, dun.
So Barnaby heads off to investigate.
There’s a local landowner who’s marrying his ward, a batty sister-in-law, the ward’s troubled artist brother, and the undertaker and his mother. The undertaker is My Very Favorite. He dresses like a Victorian gentleman, right down to a coat with tails and a little black ribbon in his hair, and he serves deeply troubling tea cakes on a very fancy cart. He’s gay as a spring morning and he and his mother have been blackmailing the entire village.
Of course, this eventually gets them brutally slaughtered, but since they show up looking exactly the same in another village ten seasons later, I’ve decided that they were sneaky enough to fake their own deaths and escape. According to the show, it’s just that they’re cousins or something, but I know Deep In My Heart that they survive.
Ahem.
So anyway.
There’s quite a few different suspects. The sister-in-law of the local lord, who thinks she shot her own sister with a rifle during some kind of pidgeon slaughtering party. The local ineffectual country doctor whose wife is having an affair with the local lord’s estate manager (and he’s very pretty–I can see why she strayed). The straying wife, who is worried about being caught. The daughter of the doctor who is having a fling with the mad artist (who always wears a truly tragic pair of denim overalls and chews the scenery like he got a degree in emo artist.) The waif like ward. The waif like ward’s artist brother. And some other people, who I forget.
While Barnaby wanders around interviewing people, you get to see lots of gorgeous scenery and cottage gardens and English shooting parties and quiet country lanes. Barnaby does have a very thoughtful mien and a quiet way about him. I suspect that dogs would curl up happily at his feet–good stillness. Troy, the current sergeant, is like a young overexhuberant bull, brashing his way through undergrowth and making rash assumptions about whodunnit and generally being kind of a homophobic jerk.
Much of the mystery, as many of the mysteries in this show are, is concerned with who was having naughty fun times in the woods on a blanket with whom.
As soon as I’d figured out that this was the big mystery, I suggested to my mom that obviously it was the brother and sister, because the whole show had a Greek/Shakespearean tragedy feel to it, and what better tragedy than random incest?
And so it proved.
Barnaby eventually figures it all out by contacting the now-adult childrens’ nanny and things are revealed and the wedding gets called off and the two young lovers commit suicide in the wood via shotgun. You know, as people do.
There’s some clever clues, phone calls, obscure words, etc. in the grand tradition of cozies everywhere. I’ve lost track of the number of times people get shot to death with arrows in Midsomer county, but it’s a lot. There’s psychics and witchcraft, the second sight, new age weirdos, writers’ societies, art fraud, retellings of Hamlet, shoutouts to Dorothy Sayers, poisoning by mushroom, hemlock, and various other dodgy substances, as well as a couple of deaths via pitchfork. Not to mention those being driven to suicide, mistaken identities, Meaningful Messages With Flowers on corpses, and so on. There’s a great episode where the local theater troup puts on Amadeus and the plot of the play and the retelling of the mystery weave together–it includes a truly horrible guy committing accidental suicide via razor on stage during the dress rehearsal.
Tiny intense hobbies take up peoples’ worlds, as they do in real life, and those often form the basis of the plot. Villains are just as likely to kill over who was prouder of their rose bushes as they are to get an inheritance. Small town dances, choir rehearsal, bell ringing, book groups, local history library photo retrospectives, fly fishing, magic tricks, Masonic societies (including the silly aprons), and more.
If you’re tired of watching ultra-realistic grim urban crime about the destruction of society that reminds you too much of yesterday, give this a try. My favorite so far is probably the revenge plot where the villain stakes a guy in a croquet circle and then catapaults the oenophile to death with vintage wines using a small siege engine (Season 8, Episode 6).
These are currently streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
* Someone here suggested I continue What The Hell Did I Just Watch into a regular feature. Maybe Netflix thought so, too. If you all feel the need for a garden gnome musical review, I’ll take it under advisement, but I may also need suitable bribes. Liquor. Brownies. Exotic drawing ink. A large wall against which to thwap my head until the images leave it. You know. The usual.
Cozies are so weird. I think they may be the weirdest current genre. Even more bizarre than superheroes or yaoi. I was just thinking about Jessica Fletcher wandering hither and yon across the country, bodies dropping around her as she goes, a busy-body angel of death.
I think it’s the way that the diegetic and the non-diegetic are so completely at odds. The detective is the putative solver of the murders, but extra-narratively it’s the fact that the detective is there in the first place that causes people to expire in preposterous fashions.
This isn’t a criticism of cozies of course — the ridiculousness is a big part of the draw….
They’re so weird. So weird! The weird revenge plot mystery cracked me up–there’s a very strange scene where the murder creates this whole Rube Goldberg contraption so that this TV obsessed game show host ends up with his head in a TV set, but he’s wearing the top of a scuba outfit, and whenever he gets the answer to the murderer’s question wrong, the murderer adds some expensive wine to the TV set, slowly filling it up. I watched the whole thing, agog.
I mean–where else do you get that AND a mini trebuchet hurling wine bottles at a guy staked out on a croquet field? Only a cozy!
Barnaby is like this pleasant, calm chap and the corpses just sort of pile up around him, while he goes “Hmm.” He never gets really angry and he’s usually rather cheerful. The contrast is definitely part of the fun.
HaHaHaHaHa!
I grew up watching all kinds of cozy, but surreal/odd/mad stuff on tv here in Britain. Have become so used to it that only when I read an article like this do I get a jolt and think- hang on a minute!
Would love your take on some programmes there have been.
Our long running police procedural ‘The Bill’ where every major actor stage, film or tv got their start early in their career, playing ‘3rd mugger’ or ‘distraught flower shop owner’ or ‘nude cyclist’ centred around a ludicrously cosy police station, where the shennanigans amongst the cops was way more entertaining than the crimes.
Or vintage action/cop/crime drama ‘The Sweeney’ aka ‘Thugs-R-Us with rough mayhem weekly from the two heros, discarding suspects’ rights a good 3 decades before ’24’.
Or the…undertones in comedy here.
Like the ‘dark’ comedies, such as ‘Nighty Night’ or the sketch shows like ‘Tittybangbang’ (yes, that IS the title) or ‘Three Non-Blondes’ which are all done by women with a filthy sense of humour.
Or the lesser known scifi, such as the juvenile-delinquents-get-super powers, whilst-doing-community-service-in-their-orange- prison-jumpsuits programme that is ‘Misfits’ or
our take on tv chat shows: Camp (Jonathan Ross) Super Camp (Graham Norton) or OMG-there-are-no-words-for-the-campery!(Alan Carr) and are all WAY better than standard boring shows like Letterman. Seeing stars freeze as they think ‘shit, did he REALLY just ask me that?’ never gets old.
Sorry to ramble on. But there really is a deep vein of eccentricity over here. Which is celebrated and yields up some great moments in music, tv, stage. The traditional Christmas Pantomime which takes place up and down the country in theatres in December and January being something that begs an outside critique. What other country introduces small children to theatre via plays full of double entendres, sly satirical commentary, and cross dressing heros (always played by women, who play the prince)and fairy godmothers (always played by middle aged men in the most gaudy, fantastic drag)?
A delightful and amusing description! The Missus and I love these British murder mystery series. Which, thanks to the local libraries, we’ve gotten many hours of pleasure from.
Including “MidSomer Murders,” other favorites are…
“Foyle’s War”; murders set in WWII-era England
“Cadfael”; murders set in Medieval England
“Inspector Morse”
“Inspector Lewis,” starring Morse’s former assistant and taking place in gorgeous Cambridge
“Dorothy L. Sayers Mysteries”
“Inspector Alleyn”
“Ruth Rendell Mysteries” (Particularly low on the “cozy” factor)
Rosemary & Thyme” (Gardening-related murder mysteries)
Everything Agatha Christie-related, of course, with “Poirot” a delight; major period eye-candy!
“Inspector Linley Mysteries”
“Prime Suspect,” starring Helen Mirren. (If it were to be remade for the U.S., they’d probably cast some California plastic-looking twenty-five-year-old in 8-inch heels. It’s striking how many British TV series star people who look like real human beings, instead of fashion models…)
“Father Brown”
“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” with Jeremy Brett splendid in the title role…
(Most of these based on/inspired by books from splendid authors, another great pleasure in their own right.)
Maybe it’s a sign of old age, but I routinely forget whodunit (and don’t much care; it’s the journey with familiar, likable sleuths that provides the enjoyment), so after a couple of years or so, can enjoy watching them again…
More info at:
http://murdermysterymayhem.blogspot.com/2009/10/cant-get-enough-of-inspector-lewis-on.html
http://knol.google.com/k/british-murder-mystery-tv#
http://www.murdermysteries.com/tv/british.htm
‘Midsomer Murders’ creator Brian True-May has been suspended after giving an interview in which he claimed the shows success is due to its all-white cast and admitting he doesn’t think it would ”work” if ethnic minority characters were featured.
http://www.list.co.uk/article/33252-midsomer-murders-creator-suspended-over-racist-comments/
Horowitz wrote the first episodes of the drama and came up with the title. He said yesterday: “Brian True-May’s comments were inappropriate and should not have been made, but in our over-sensitive society there is this silly reaction to anything we say that involves ethnicity or religion. There is no racist attitude at work here. Nobody involved in the making of this programme has a Little England mentality.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8383788/Midsomer-Murders-is-not-racist-says-Anthony-Horowitz.html
Yes, I’d read that story. A lot of the “cozies” do derive their charm from a nostalgically old-fashioned version of England; in which, among other factors, racial minorities are far less prevalent.*
In past times, indeed a reality; in the present, it’s no surprise that rural, small-town England — the setting of Midsomer Murders — is far more “white” than urban areas.
Those sure were astonishingly boneheaded remarks of True-Mays’, though…
Garth Ennis: Anti-Messiah, or just a very naughty boy?
* Consider the pretty-much “whites only” world of virtually all Norman Rockwell paintings, in a country where African-Americans were a far larger demographic than blacks in the England of those times…
(Until he started dealing with race in his few overtly political [aside for the Allies in WWII] works in the 60s.)
Oops; that floating “Garth Ennis: Anti-Messiah, or just a very naughty boy?” line came from where I’d been meaning to mention how this thread related to the talk about “justice” over in that thread.
We watched a DVD with three Hercule Poirot stories (starring the outstanding David Suchet) last night. As it turns out, in two of those stories — as in many Christie tales — the noxious victim richly deserved their fate, their killer thoroughly justified in their actions.
As I saw Robert Blake put it back when he was a regular guest in The Tonight Show, “some people need snuffing!” (Johnny Carson tried to make light of the remark, said you don’t really mean that! But Blake, though his mood remained jovial, insisted he did. I guess the prosecution didn’t know to bring up that TV clip in his much later murder trial…)
Yet for Christie and others, aside from narrative necessities (a nasty person would have far more enemies/suspected killers; the murderer “getting away with it” would be dramatically unsatisfying) the idea that murder is a societally-corrosive action, usually not to be condoned, would be an important driving force for their investigators.
Sure…but you don’t think that the concern about social corrosion and that producer’s nostalgia for a whiter England have something to do with each other? Or the fact that justice is the banner under which minorities in the U.S. are systematically harassed?
Thanks for the editing, Noah.
Got to mention that both paragraphs are citations (as one can see easily by checking the links), that´s why they were quoted by me in the earlier version – don´t want the credit for that.
And I´m sure one can see there´s a connectivity between True-May´s nostalgia for a whiter England and his concerns about social corrosions by not turning a blind eye on the fact of producing a programme of such content nowadays.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Sure…but you don’t think that the concern about social corrosion and that producer’s nostalgia for a whiter England have something to do with each other?
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Well, what do you mean by “social corrosion,” which can cover a great deal of territory? Is it an increase in the crime rate, falling apart of the mutually-upheld standards and values which enable a society to survive (one Democratic pollster said of modern elections, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work…”*)? Or, a change in the demographics of a culture, which bring negative consequences** as well as positives?
Aside from two or three exceptions (not so coincidentally, more like straight mysteries/police procedurals), in no “cozy” — or regular mystery, period (British or American) — that I’ve seen or read has the murderer turned out to be anything other than a Caucasian.
One of the very few notable exceptions are the extremely fine England-set Inspector Alleyn books…
(the TV shows, though well-done are but a pale shadow of the psychological and emotional richness of the novels; nothing more dwindled than the utterly wonderful Barbara Havers, prickly, chunky, unglamorous, working-class with the heart of a lion)
…by Elizabeth George, an American who writes like a born n’ bred Britisher. Set in modern times, ethnic characters, conflicts and prejudice play a significant role in many books. One major character is even murdered by a black slum youth, and George devotes a book — What Came Before He Shot Her — to following that young man through the travails that led up to that point. (As the essays in http://www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com/essays/index.htm make further evident, George is hardly of the Fox News-cheering group.)
Ruth Rendell in her Inspector Wexford novels has likewise dealt with troubling racial issues in modern Britain; such as, in Not In the Flesh, the attempt by tradition-minded Somali immigrants to continue their hideous practice of female genital mutilation in the new land, with other Somalis seeking to thwart this. (More details at http://rosaberger.hubpages.com/hub/Ruth_Rendell_Not-In-The-Flesh .) Rendell is not quite as progressive-minded as George (her “DS Hannah Goldsmith…[who]…examines more or less every English word or phrase in terms of its sexist undertones…” is tiresomely strident, even if well-meaning), but far from wishing to return to the “good ol’ days” of a mostly-white England.
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Or the fact that justice is the banner under which minorities in the U.S. are systematically harassed?
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Does that mean that justice is bad, or that it provides a handy tool by those who want to keep them down to use against those minorities who make themselves vulnerable by breaking the law?
And, the #1 cause of death of young black men is…young black men. Is the legal system to be condemned when it puts those who prey upon their fellows, encourage drug addiction, terrorize their neighborhoods, in prison? Thus making “the black community” safer?
*In Attack Dog, a profile of attack-ads master Larry McCarthy, in the Feb. 13 & 20 New Yorker…
**In one TCJ message board debate, one chap maintained that no country should be allowed to control changes in its demographic make-up. Why, of course; it would be racist and “anti-immigrant” to say that Native Americans should not have welcomed the European explorers and “settlers” with open arms…
Crime is a problem in inner-city areas, obviously. But systematically oppressing black people through the justice system doesn’t help, just as a massive military invasion of say, Iraq, doesn’t necessarily make that country safer. Imperialism is about the desires, dreams, and goals of the imperialist, not about helping the conquered, though the conquered’s problems are always of course used to justify it.
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