Reviewed by Louise Bolotin
Stars Angela Lansbury, William Windom, Ron Masak, Bradford Dillman,
Louis Herthum | Written by Peter Fischer, Richard Levinson & William Link
UK certification 12 | UK RRP £34.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 940 minutes | Directed by various
Jessica Fletcher is one of those TV detectives blatantly modelled on Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple but redesigned for the US market. Thus, Fletcher is tweedy but a career woman rather than a country village spinster and has American homespun wisdom running through her as clearly as a stick of Brighton rock.
In the UK, Murder She Wrote is usually aired in the afternoon, a sure sign of its undemanding cosiness, and frequently aired too, so why anyone would want to buy it is a mystery to me, but no doubt Fletcher could solve that one for me. Anyway, Season 10 is now available on DVD, all 21 episodes of it.
As she’s a novelist (albeit one who never seems to actually write anything), Fletcher has plenty of excuses to turn up at all kinds of places and events and stumble across all manner of dead bodies. In Season 10, she gets to travel everywhere in the US from New York to the Blue Ridge Mountains as well as to more exotic locations such as Ireland and Hong Kong. It’s tightly enough scripted and competently acted by a cast of many, but the plots are fairly transparent and you can usually spot whodunit well in advance of each episode’s denouement.
It’s all as much of a nonsense as Midsomer Murders but if you just want to be entertained while enjoying a pot of afternoon tea, this’ll do the job nicely.
EXTRAS None