where to watch: Amazon Prime (may need Acorn TV subscription after March)
when to watch: when you want to actually watch “just one episode”; when you want easy, fun entertainment with a level of intrigue/mystery
you should note: Season 1 is available with an Amazon Prime subscription until March, but after that you may need an Acorn TV add-on subscription. It’s only $5/month and honestly worth it if you like British and Australian TV, especially for quarantine purposes!
tl;dr: An impossibly glamorous woman living in Melbourne in the 1920s solves murders
If you’ve read my “TV philosophy,” you know that one of the reasons I love TV so much is the intimacy. Unlike a movie, where you are with a character for at most a few hours, we often spend years with TV show characters. They enter our homes and then our hearts. It’s one of my favorite things about TV, but in the age of bingeing, it actually isn’t always true.
On the one hand, perhaps we’re more intimate with these characters than ever, watching them on our phones held 6 inches from our face, curled up in our beds. But on the other hand, you binge 8 hours of a show in two days, and then you don’t think about those characters for a year. That’s a very different experience from the traditional network show where you hang out with the same folks once a week for months on end. I think it’s valuable to have both kinds of shows in your rotation.
characters
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is not a show that should be binged. It’s a show where you can get to know the characters and the world and the ambiance. It is delightfully cheesy, it almost reminds me of old Bond films. It feels so different from the type of TV I usually watch. It’s also easy to love.
It’s an Australian show that takes place in Melbourne in the 1920s. The production budget doesn’t seem to be massive, so the sets are not particularly elaborate, but Miss Fisher always has stunning costumes. She’s such an awesome main character. She’s middle-aged, wealthy, has had a wild, well-traveled life, and sleeps with at least one person per murder. Miss Fisher’s always dressed impeccably, has stunning cars, is extremely modern and feminist, and also incredibly sweet. She’s smart, stubborn, and picks up on clues the police miss.
In addition to Miss Fisher, there’s the very handsome Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, an equally attractive and innocent Constable Hugh Collins, Miss Fisher’s butler named Mr. Butler (yes, that is really his name!), and my personal favorite, “Dot,” Miss Fisher’s young, naive, very Catholic maid/protegée. There’s also the taxi drivers Bert and Cec that Miss Fisher meets in the first episode and proceeds to hire as….I’m not sure exactly what. A few other characters pop up here and again.
what’s not to love?
For a murder mystery series, this show is refreshingly lighthearted. The murders are not violent. The characters are all adorable. Each episode ends with a cheesy closing circle fade out. Thought it is only from 2012, the show reminds me of other much older lighthearted murder TV shows, like Murder, She Wrote.
It’s like each episode you enter into Miss Fisher’s world for a bit, and then you leave it. I don’t often like procedural TV shows because I hate when each episode feels completely disconnected, but Miss Fisher does a good job balancing ongoing character plotlines with unrelated murders.
In addition to all that, who doesn’t want to see a woman decked out in fabulous 1920s garb and high heels climb up buildings and hide in alleyways to shoot people with her tiny revolver?
Your thoughts on how the intimacy of TV is changing is really interesting. It also makes me wonder about big film franchises and how we sometimes spend many years with those characters as well—although, on a different level. I wonder what will happen once Marvel begins to release its TV shows on top of its feature films… What do you think the benefits and drawbacks of that will be?
It’s true, the MCU is probably the best example of a film franchise where we have developed relationships with these characters over years and years. That’s why Endgame worked so well.
I’ll be interested to see what happens with the Marvel TV shows, because inevitably some people won’t watch them and only watch the movies. I wonder the degree to which any of the things happening in the shows will be addressed in films. In terms of intimacy, I think it will deepen our relationship with the characters and I’m really excited about that! Especially because the shows focus on characters who haven’t had their day in the sun yet and we don’t know as well as we could.
My only concern is if they will still be able to do one of the things they do best- make it easy for people who have not seen everything to follow along. Obviously, audiences who have seen everything have a greater understanding, but one of the things that makes Marvel movies work so well and be so successful is that you don’t have to have seen everything to understand a singular movie within their volume. They are almost procedural in that sense. I wonder if the TV shows will change that or how they will go around that. It will be exciting to see!