Murder, She Wrote - The Complete First Season

Murder, She Wrote - The Complete First Season Review

On Sunday, September 30, 1984, the beginning of a television franchise hit the airwaves for twelve years without looking back.

After the success of Agatha Christie's MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, CBS-TV was on the lookout for another mystery show to help them climb up in the ratings for their Sunday nights. At the time, audiences had taken an interest in the murder mystery atmosphere. Murder She Wrote creators: Peter S. Fischer, William Link and Richard Levinson found the answer in their TV pilot, THE MURDER OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. At first, their search for the right actress came up empty-handed. That was until Angela Lansbury (at the time, a Broadway actress) came on to the scene. After reading the script for Murder She Wrote, she was interested in the role of mystery writer, Jessica Fletcher. She liked the redeeming qualities of the New England busybody. Strong, independent, feisty, no-nonsense.

As the saying goes, the rest is history. Although, during the first few seasons, the brutal eighteen hour work days proved strenuous on the actress. In interviews, Lansbury told the press that she didn't realize how difficult the workload was going to be. Working well into the earlier hours, it was grueling for the then fifty-nine-year-old actress.

However, perseverance and hard work paid off. The long-running detective show ran for an astonishing twelve years. For which the TV viewers are thankful. Cabot Cove fans should rejoice. Viewers get a look into the life of America's favorite Down East mystery writer. Many of the episodes in Season One depict Jessica Fletcher in her hometown in Maine.

Season one includes twenty-two murderous episodes:

1) "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes" (Cabot Cove, Maine; New York City; New Holvang, New York)
2) "Deadly Lady" (Cabot Cove, Maine)
3) "Birds of a Feather" (San Francisco, California)
4) "Hooray for Homicide" (Cabot Cove, Maine; Los Angeles, California)
5) "It's a Dog's Life" (Greenville, Virginia)
6) "Lovers and Other Killers" (Seattle, Washington)
7) "Hit, Run and Homicide" (Cabot Cove, Maine)
8) "We're Off to Kill the Wizard" (Suburb of Chicago, Illinois)
9) "Death Takes a Curtain Call" (Boston Massachusetts; Cabot Cove, Maine)
10)"Death Casts a Spell" (Lake Tahoe, Nevada)
11)"Capitol Offense" (Cabot Cove, Maine; Washington, D.C.)
12)"Broadway Malady" (Cabot Cove, Maine; New York City)
13)"Murder to a Jazz Beat" (New Orleans, Louisiana)
14)"My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean" (The high seas; St. Thomas, Virgin Islands)
15)"Paint Me a Murder" (A remote Mediterranean isle)
16)"Tough Guys Don't Die" (Boston Massachusetts; Cabot Cove, Maine)
17)"Sudden Death" (not stated)
18)"Footnote to Murder" (New York City)
19)"Murder Takes the Bus" (Cabot Cove, Maine; Maine's Route 1 between Cabot Cove and Portland)
20)"Armed Response" (Dallas, Texas)
21)"Murder at the Oasis" (Desert Palms, California)
22)"Funeral at Fifty-Mile" (Fifty-Mile Wyoming)

T.B. Grant

Murder, She Wrote - The Complete First Season Overview

Mystery writer Jessica Fletcher solves murders in her hometown and while traveling.

Murder, She Wrote - The Complete First Season Specifications

There are two audiences for this DVD compilation of the first season of the enormously popular TV series Murder, She Wrote. The first enjoys 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.

The other audience for Murder, She Wrote: The Complete First Season consists of viewers for whom names like Bert Convy, Dack Rambo, and Barbara Babcock send waves of guilty pleasure down their spines. The promotional materials for this boxed set make much ado about brief appearances by stars-to-be like Andy Garcia (who appears briefly as "1st White Tough" in the pilot TV movie) and Joaquin Phoenix (who's around 10 years old and still going by the name Leaf), but every single episode is a festival of B-, C-, and Z-grade celebrities from the 1970s and '80s: Claude Akins, Tom Bosley, Jeff Conaway, David Doyle, Samantha Eggar, Lynda Day George, Morgan Brittany, Belinda Montgomery, Gabe Kaplan, and Lyle Waggoner, just to name a handful. Some of these names may be forgotten, but their faces (and scenery-chewing performances) will spark a Proustian rush of television memories. --Bret Fetzer

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