Nothing is so likely to lure me to the television set as a good, short mystery. Fortunately or unfortunately, Netflix has a goodly assortment of the same. Lately, our queue has been filled with an offering from Canadian TV, Murdoch Mysteries. The still-running show is based on the books of Maureen Jennings; I've placed a hold at our library for the first of her tales of Detective William Murdoch, hoping to find them an improvement over the filmed version.
Not that the shows aren't enjoyable—if they weren't, we wouldn't be into the third season now. The premise is interesting: Murdoch is a police detective in 1890's Toronto who solves his cases using scientific methods and equipment that are unknown, little used, or even not quite invented yet. Think CSI: Victorian Toronto.
What causes the fingernails-on-the-blackboard feeling is that, while slightly advancing scientific knowledge for the time period, the show greatly advances the main characters' social attitudes. Be it feminism, abortion, homosexuality, birth control, dating behavior, the church, business practices, or government agents, the setting may be the late 19th century, but the attitudes of the main characters are pure 21st century Hollywood.
You can only push the audience's credulity so far. If you ask them to accept one unrealistic premise, the rest of your story should be believable. J. R. R. Tolkien peopled his created world with fantastic creatures—but they thought, spoke, and acted in familiar ways that we could understand. (That's one of the quarrels I have with the movies—I find them less believable than the books—but that's another post.) J. K. Rowling had no difficulty getting us to accept a world of magic because Hogwarts was otherwise (I assume) a typical British boarding school. (Where it wasn't, the discontinuity was glaring. I still haven't gotten over a British boy describing something as "the size of a baseball bat.")
I'll accept a Toronto police detective using x-ray photography, but I can't swallow a supposedly devout Victorian-era Catholic seriously pursuing a romantic relationship with a non-Catholic, and one with strident anti-Catholic attitudes at that. And I choke every time a character says to a victim's loved one, "I'm sorry for your loss." I don't know exactly when that expression became commonplace, but it was within my lifetime. We've learned to live with the frequent anachronisms, but they diminish the show's credibility.
My favorite character is Constable George Crabtree (played by Jonny Harris), supposedly naive and somewhat dim-witted, but often smarter, and certainly more likeable, than the rest.
The mysteries themselves are inconsistent: some so ridiculous we're certain they cut out important scenes to save time, some very clever with more unexpected twists than an Olympic gymnast.
But what I really like is the music, especially the theme song, and the opening credits. Composer Robert Carli has made the most creative use of percussion (think percussion toys and "bells" in all forms) and percussion-like instrumentation (e.g. pizzicato strings) that I can remember. There's also an artistic flair to the colors and the lettering of the credits that appeals to me. You can get a taste of it here. But only a taste, because for some reason the action of the video seems sped up, which takes away from its elegance.
