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The classic pleasures of the pre-forensics "whodunit," stories in which murder
was not so much a crime as a logic puzzle; the joy here lay in how skillfully a
writer could misdirect you. Murder, She Wrote--in which mystery writer
Jessica Fletcher constantly stumbles across dead bodies in every setting
imaginable, from a San Francisco drag show to a football field--doesn't have the
elegance of an Agatha Christie or Rex Stout mystery, but the show was efficient
at laying out its clues and cunningly used the audience's familiarity with
television itself (the relative star power of the guests, the need for a
dramatic high point before every commercial break, etc.) to mislead and
manipulate. And of course Angela Lansbury, as Fletcher, was an ideal television
presence: Warm and friendly, but with just a hint of the fierce, steely will she
revealed in The Manchurian Candidate. Lansbury drove the show through an
impressive twelve seasons (for which she received twelve Emmy nominations) plus
multiple TV movies after its cancellation. |
