One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Midsomer Murders. It should be on Masterpiece Mystery, but somehow I don’t think it ever has been one of their shows, and
it certainly isn’t one now. (The Wikipedia list does not include it, so I think it has never been on Masterpiece
Mystery.) But they have made a major change
in the show recently, and I’m not so sure it’s such a good idea.
In the last couple of seasons before DCI (Or did he get to
DCS?) Barnaby’s retirement, they were really pushing for the promotion and
re-teaming of Jones with some policewoman named Stephens, and I liked her, and
her with Jones, who I always thought was the perfect second-banana to Barnaby.
Well, just like Inspector Morse passed
the torch to Inspector Lewis, I
thought Midsomer Murders would
pass the torch to Jones and Stephens. (It sure looked like they were planning
on it!)
But instead they got some “cousin” of Barnaby to come take
over for him. Is this general police practice in England: to get someone’s
cousin to take over for them when they retire? It’s truly ridiculous! I mean, I
could understand it if the show was called: “Barnaby”, but it’s not; it’s
called: “Midsomer Murders”, so who cares what the investigator’s name is? I
guess they must have done focus groups who said they didn’t have confidence in
Jones or something, or there must be a Barnaby or else nobody will watch it:
what else could it be?
But that’s not even what I think they dropped the ball on
here. You see, they had one of their last episodes with Tom Barnaby have his
wife Joyce think she might have hit and killed someone with her car at night,
and Barnaby was trying to tread lightly and make sure it wasn’t her. But they
could have ended the series with a bang had they just had Joyce be the killer,
and then it turns out that she has a split-personality, and she’s secretly the
killer of every victim of the entire TV series, and her husband has been
covering it all up all along and framing other people for all the crimes
throughout the entire series. (For fans of this show, remember that for most
shows, Joyce is involved in some activity, like painting, or theater, etc., and
there is a murder; so this would explain why she’s always somehow tangentially
involved in stuff where the murders occur: because she’s secretly a vicious
serial killer, but she has a split-personality, so she never remembers anything
afterwards!) Then at the end, they do a double-suicide pact, and Cully has to
call it in, and then Jones takes over, and he has to release all the people who
were framed for all the other murders.
Oh, but after all these years in prison, all these innocent
people have developed massive egos and revenge plans and they’ve been training
for them all along. So now they all become super villains, and so Jones has to
become a superhero, and it just so happens that his American cousin is Batman,
so Batman comes over to help put away all these new super villains in Midsomer,
and that’s what he’s been doing since he took the blame for Two-Face’s crimes.
(And that’s why he’s been inactive in Gotham City for a while.) And that way
they could bring someone’s cousin into the show in a much more awesome way,
seeing as how English law supposedly insists upon someone’s cousin coming into
the show whenever there is a major change. (And wouldn’t it have been a
memorable end to a great series? They could have the new Midsomer super
villains be just regular citizens who, once living for years with other master
criminals, have been trained in the dark arts of criminality, and so they name
themselves after what they used to do; like for instance, some guy who owned a
plant nursery could become “Weed Man” {corrupting the innocent flowerbeds of
society!}, or some art history instructor could become the villain “Abstract”
{always in an incomprehensible form!}, or some pub owner could become “The
Devilish D.T.s” {with the power to hypnotize people into experiencing the
symptoms of delirium tremens!}, etc.)
(BTW: Sorry I’m not as up on Midsomer Murders as I could be: because Masterpiece Mystery has apparently never deigned to include it as one of
their shows, I have only had NetFlix as a source, and they only go through
season 12. So I’ve had to look on YouTube for further episodes and read up on
them on IMDB.)
