Murder, She Wrote

[Khan]

Yes, it's true.  One of MSW's writer/producers was a murderer.

http://classictvhistory.com/MiscArticles/laurence_heath.html

Edited February 17, 2022 by Khan

[FrenchBug82]

The Magnum crossover episodes were very weird and kinda sucked but Jessica Walters!

 

Edited February 17, 2022 by FrenchBug82

[Paul Raven]

Over 10 billion viewers (mostly the over 50 crowd) watched 'Murder, She Wrote' during the 12 seasons the show originally went on air (1984-1996). "I made up my mind when I was 58 that I better think seriously about getting into television. This was going to be my annuity," Angela Lansbury admitted. Between 1985 and 1994, 'Murder, She Wrote' was the highest-rated drama on television. 

 

"People my age and older say thank you for depicting a woman of our generation in a way that is up, that is forward-looking, that is not age-conscious, but simply has her take her place in life with all of the sense of responsibility and fun and energy that she can muster," Angela added. In its last season (1995-96), CBS moved 'Murder, She Wrote' from Sunday after '60 Minutes' to Thursday against 'Friends' because "ad rates for the hour were about a third less than its Sunday night competitor 'Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman'." 

 

Of the success of 'Murder, She Wrote', Peter S. Fischer elaborated, "I think there are a lot of reasons. One of them is that America loves Angela Lansbury. The Sunday time slot has a lot to do with it. We get a lot of our audience from '60 Minutes'. Theoretically, the people who watch '60 Minutes' are the kind who watch mysteries. They don't normally watch TV. It's a show about an older woman. There's no action, no sex. Our audience has learned to stay on to solve the puzzle. They were intimidated at first but they have learned that all the clues are in plain sight. Many of our audience sit around the living room and try to outguess each other." 

 

In 1984 Jessica Fletcher, a one-time substitute teacher had just published her first mystery novel as well as solved her first case. By 1988, "her world has opened up tremendously." Angela Lansbury told Associated Press, "The big change is that she has become very successful as a writer. She has become a celebrity. She has become more urbane and sophisticated, although she has not lost that small-town feeling. She has become a champion of middle-aged women and women struggling to maintain their position in life, even though they're alone." 

 

Angela Lansbury maintained, "It doesn't represent in any way a stretch, as we call it, to play Jessica Fletcher but to play Jessica, a role that has such enormous, universal appeal – that was an accomplishment I never expected in my entire life. I thought 'Murder, She Wrote' would last maybe a year or two, and that would have been fine. But it seems to have become an institution." 

 

Angela believed 'Murder, She Wrote' was popular because "it says that problems can be solved, mysteries can be unravelled. That life's anarchy can be straightened out. To make an episode work, you have to have an interesting yarn and present the audience with a set of clues and with suspects, showing how they might or might not be suspicious. I really don't want Jessica just walking through these scripts. I don't want her to be a question-and-answer machine. 

 

"You have to introduce elements putting her in danger. I want a little challenge for me. I know there are women who are my age, some widows, some who have never married, who relish the fact that I'm there with this character, who really love the fact that Jessica gets out there and messes in with life. I think it's wonderful to be able to represent that, even to the smallest degree, on television." 

 

The role of Jessica Fletcher was first offered to Jean Stapleton who decided to turn down the part. Speaking to the 'Los Angeles Times' in 1985, Angela Lansbury confessed she "didn't honestly expect the show to take off in the amazing way that it has ... On the one hand, I love the success and am enjoying that tremendously. On the other, I resist this takeover that it represents of my life … You're caught in a trap – that's what I'm not sure about. It's awfully hard to walk away from success, isn't it? 

 

"I liked what I visualized her to be when I read the script. There was something about her quality that I felt I could adapt myself to very easily, and very comfortably, and hopefully she could be an attractive person even though I was playing a middle-aged widow. I felt she was courageous and full of excitement and energy about life and people. This attracted me to her because that's my feeling about life and people. I don't have any feeling of being any age, and my enthusiasm for living and the prospect for the future never diminishes." 

 

Peter S. Fischer came up with the idea of Jessica Fletcher being younger than Miss Marple. Angela Lansbury continued, "He played up the fact that physically, Jessica was a very active woman – she rode bicycle, she jogged, she looked after herself. She did not drive a car. I don't quite know why. As it turned out, it was a very good thing she didn't because it precludes, in a sense, the need for car chases. 

 

"We have enough of them – there are enough shows that do very, very exciting car chases. Otherwise, we'd all end up in the underground garages of Los Angeles along with everybody else. We're not 'Hill Street Blues' or 'Miami (Vice)', we're not any of those things. We're simply mystery stories concerning the mystery of murder. It's unraveling, gathering all the clues and personalities involved in murder." 

[BetterForgotten]

 

[Khan]

In a way, Angela Lansbury and Jessica Fletcher did (and do) represent every woman -- or, at least, every woman of a certain age.  Just about everyone, I believe, knows a lady who is still as active and vital as Angela/Jessica; and if they don't, then they hope to be as active as she is when they're that age.

To me, it's that kind of across-the-board appeal with viewers (and make no mistake, people from all ages and walks of life adore Angela Lansbury and Jessica Fletcher) that makes for solid characters and series.  So many shows out there today don't achieve that level of success, not because there's so many viewing options out there, but because producers don't try presenting characters whom everyone could admire, empathize with or appreciate.

And I think that's why MSW reruns continue to attract audiences to this day.  No offense to the grittier shows of the day or the people who loved them (myself included), but many don't hold up as well when you watch them today.  MSW does.  To quote another poster, it's timeless.

About the only other detective(ish) show from yesteryear that I think stands up to multiple, repeated viewings is "The Rockford Files"; and again, as with MSW and Angela Lansbury, it's largely due to James Garner, who possessed an everyman quality that still makes him attractive to most viewers.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Khan

[Cat]

It really is timeless. I was visiting my parents' place a few weeks ago, and my mom was in the kitchen, finishing up cooking, when Murder She Wrote came on the TV. Literally she, my dad and I sat down to eat watching the show. At the second commercial break, my dad leaned over and asked: "So, who do you think did it??" 

Having grown up in the 80s watching Miss Marple and Poirot on PBS, MSW seemed the natural evolution for the Agatha Christie murder mysteries -- a real-life American Agatha Christie (of course, the real Agatha Christie was half-American!) investigating murders, because her writing has given her the know-how.

Angela Lansbury exudes a very warm, empathetic aura on MSW, and she is also smart. She has the audience's heart, but she also earns their respect. 

My mom especially found Angela Lansbury aspirational. She bought the AL stretching/exercise video for older ladies way back in the day. And she dug Angela's MSW style (80s good-quality Talbots with some Aquascutum raincoats/scarves thrown in).

ETA: I will also never forget, in the mid-to-late 90s, when Moonves moved MSW from Sunday nights to Thursdays at 8pm opposite Friends, Angela Lansbury went on all the early morning talk shows and called "Mr. Moonves" out by name for wanting to kill MSW. She was 100% right, of course, and even then I thought she was brave standing up to a boss who clearly didn't give a sh!t about her or what she had done for CBS. From that moment on, I associated Moonves' name with assholery, and boy, were we all sadly proved right on that score.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Cat

[Khan]

Ah, yes.  "Angela Lansbury's Positive Moves."  I still recall thumbing through the book version as a child at my local Venture department store.

Angela had absolutely nothing to lose by calling out Les Moonves publicly.  She'd proven many times over how valuable she and her show were to CBS.  If anything, I wish another network (maybe NBC?) had had the guts to cook up a deal with Corymore and Universal to bring the show over to them (with the promise to keep it on Sunday nights), as MSW had proven they could still bring in viewers.

As a matter of fact, when AL and her family formally took over MSW's production, they did a rare thing: they took a long-running series that WAS showing some signs of fading and placed it back in the Top 10 without alienating its' audience.  Like I said upthread, not all episodes were winners -- which was true even during the Peter S. Fischer/David Moessinger years -- but the quality nevertheless remained high.

ETA: Compare that to, say, "Law & Order: SVU."  The more control Mariska Hargitay exerts over her series, the more unwatchable it becomes.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Khan

[Khan]

I really don't believe that's true.  I could be wrong, of course, but I truly believe the majority of MSW fans weren't over fifty.  Even my current boss, who was probably still shitting his diapers when Jessica had solved her last whodunnit, probably knows about the show.

To quote Thomas Magnum, "I know what you're gonna say;" no other network would have touched a series that (allegedly) skewed older in the demographics.  Perhaps.  But, to the networks, a top 10 series is STILL a top 10 series; and that's what MSW still was before Les Moonves smothered it to death with a pillow.

Edited February 18, 2022 by Khan

[Cat]

@Khan Moonves systematically smothered ANY show headed/produced by a females.  It must have enraged him no end that MSW was still so popular, headlined by an older lady, no less. As Linda Bloodworth-Thomason described so perfectly, Les preferred 'girls' looking like a young Britney Spears and playing Dead Hooker of the Week on his innumerable CSI shows.

Watching a couple of Superbowl ads from last weekend targeted at an aging Gen X demo, makes ne wonder if network TV might shift towards those older demographics it used to malign...

[Khan]

They might as well.  The demographics they DO want gave up on network TV a long time ago.

[kalbir]

Yeah, CBS really did Angela Lansbury dirty in 1995/96 after the way she carried the network's primetime lineup over the previous decade. That season CBS's only Top 10 show was 60 Minutes. 1995/96 was also the season where CBS tried to be young and cool with the "You're On" promos but that didn't work so the following season they went to "Welcome Home".

Murder She Wrote and Crazy Like a Fox were the only new CBS shows of 1984/85 that returned for 1985/86, and they both were in the 1984/85 Top 10. Crazy Like a Fox was a time slot hit, as it was done once it no longer had Murder She Wrote as it's lead in.

I would've loved to be a fly on the wall in the Dallas producers office when the 1985/86 final ratings showed Murder She Wrote ahead of Dallas. 

Three seasons in the Top 5 (1985/86, 1986/87, 1992/93), five seasons in the Top 10 (1984/85, 1987/88, 1988/89, 1991/92, 1994/95), three seasons in the Top 15 (1989/90, 1990/91, 1993/94) cannot be just from the 50+ audience alone.

[Khan]

That's what I'm saying!

[Soaplovers]

My parents were in their 20s when the show debuted and it ended right as they hit 40...and they watched it in Sundays.  So it wasn't just 50+

[Khan]

IMO, many young people watched the show, too, if only because they looked at Jessica Fletcher as being like the parent, grandparent, aunt or teacher they had or wished they had.  Like I said upthread, Jessica was never judgmental.  She was always curious about people and willing to try new things (as long as they didn't involve getting behind the wheel of a car, lol).

They really should have called that show "Dumb As a Rock."  The cast was totally wasted.

Edited February 19, 2022 by Khan

[Paul Raven]

that was what the article claimed not my statement.

 

That was true of soaps also. Many younger viewers enjoyed the older characters as much as the young 'uns. interfering snobs like Palmer and Pheobe, or nurturing types like Alice Horton fed their fantasies of either evil oldies who stood in the way of young love or supportive grandmas they may not have had in real life.

But the networks ignored that and tried to phase out anyone over 50 to keep the focus on the hot youngsters, cos that's why the desired demos  watch soaps.