Now that the election is over, we can return to more traditional and less frightening forms of entertainment. When the evenings draw in and the temperature falls with the leaves, there’s nothing as comforting as a nice murder. Tonight, millions of respectable, non-violent Americans will double lock their doors and settle down to an evening of mayhem and homicide on the small screen. The murder rate in America has been going down for a long time but on television it has gone the opposite way. By the age of eighteen, according to Mr. Google, the average citizen has watched 40,000 murders.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that at least some TV producers have discovered ways to make murder fun, if not for the victim then at least for everybody else. Most of these good-humored murder stories come from Britain, Australia or Canada, perhaps because the chance of actually being murdered in those countries is very low indeed, so that the event can be enjoyed without anxiety. These foreign murders are typically set in a reassuringly stylish and civilized past, and in delightfully picturesque places. If you believe these tales, every charming English village is a war zone with a murder once a week. I’m talking about popular and endlessly repeated Public Television series like Midsomer Murders, Miss Fisher’s Mysteries, Father Brown, Poirot, Miss Marple, and a dozen others.
What makes them funny, and not grim and gruesome like violence on commercial television, is the invariable formula that, as it were, sanitizes the murder or murders (there are usually several) and provides a satisfying ending. The formula calls for a detective, professional or amateur, with a comical, incompetent sidekick, a disagreeable police chief, and a medical examiner who, unlike most real medical examiners, is often female and beautiful. There is a love interest, and a plot that almost always involves a vast inheritance, romantic jealousy or some betrayal in the distant past. Nobody seems to have a regular job, so they can devote their time entirely to constructing plots that are so ludicrously complicated that Mr. Holmes himself would be baffled.
The amusing murder mystery has been in decline in recent years, and this is a symptom of the decline of murder in general - not the quantity of murders, which is more than adequate, but the quality. They have no elaborate plots, no false clues, no subtlety at all. How often do we hear (for example) of a notorious criminal being murdered on a train, which is stuck in a snowdrift, by a conspiracy of all his past victims, each of whom strikes a blow with the knife, and the mystery is solved by a Belgian detective who just happens to be on the train at the time? This sort of thing almost never happens these days, even on the Long Island Rail Road, but it happened in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Most modern murders are committed over trivial amounts of money or drugs, and a third of them are never solved. Who wants to watch a TV show about such sordid disputes, without as much as a happy ending?
Have today’s young thugs never heard of the public broadcasting network? If they can’t do better than this, they should get with the program, or just give up homicide altogether and, like the rest of us, get their guilty pleasures from television.
Copyright: David Bouchier
