A recent episode of CSI:NY makes me long for the good old days of Cabot Cove.
A friend of mine is a CSI:NY addict, and a few weeks ago, he convinced me to give it a try. In the first 10 minutes, a man was crushed, a la Wile E. Coyote, between two huge shipping crates. His body was then separated into two pieces, and discovered oozing blood and dripping with blackened pieces of flesh. Then, in another storyline, a woman was strapped to the front of a truck, impaled at high speed into a tree, and left for dead. Both murders were particularly gruesome, and although I'm generally not squeamish, I admit to my stomach being left a little weak.
Watching this episode of CSI:NY made me nostalgic for earlier days of television, when crime was perhaps more innocent and, dare I say, civilized. I'm sure these types of CSI:NY murders occur in real life, but growing up, I preferred the less shocking but still captivating tales of an ex-substitute teacher-turned-mystery novelist-turned-amateur sleuth named Jessica Fletcher. I loved Murder, She Wrote.
As a kid, I watched the show religiously on Sunday nights. During the commercial break before the final installment when the mystery is solved, I would call a fellow Murder, She Wrote geek (we were eight or nine) and try to solve the crime. I remember rarely getting it right, but always being impressed by how logically it had all worked out — how the character motivations made sense and how the clues had been laid out for us viewers, had we only paid close enough attention.
The premise of the show was a little absurd, but that was part of the fun. You always wondered what got into the water in Cabot Cove to cause so many murders in one town. And you had to ignore the fact that, had anyone just happened to run across as many murders as Jessica Fletcher, it would've led to serious depression. Jessica always seemed to be stumbling into trouble, but thank God because the police always got it wrong. Every week, I got a thrill watching Fletcher outdo the often arrogant and dismissive police captains who tried to get "that nice old lady" to "stop poking her nose where it didn't belong." She was a rebel — she knew she was smarter than those police captains, and, to the audience's approval, she would always cheerfully and politely dismiss their dismissals. Of course, in the end, Jessica solved the crime with her knowledge of human relationships and motivations, and was fearless in the face of danger.
I even loved the theme song. A few years ago, a friend made up words to go along with the tune. ("It's all about a murder, a murder, she wrote... ") And I always tried to read the words of the novel she is typing during the opening credits montage ("Arnold raced out the door... ") to see if they corresponded to a specific episode. Maybe someone out there knows: Do they?
At the end of the month, the first season of Murder, She Wrote will be released on DVD. I've lost track of the show over the past few years, as it has been banished to the world of reruns for seniors on channels I don't watch. Sometimes I'll surf around and catch half an episode, but it's been a while since I watched a whole mystery, from beginning to end, and tried to solve it myself. With this new DVD, I'll have the opportunity to watch Jessica ride again (her bike, that is) and relive the innocent and simple pleasure of solving murders in a sleepy town in Maine. It's a long way from the crime scene investigators of New York and Miami, but it's a quiet world that I prefer.
Diamond in the Rough is a weekly celebration of all those terrific entertainment possibilities being ignored by other media outlets.
