I’ve only known one person who was murdered, and then it was only tangentially.

I never met him while he was alive. He was the son of one of my dad’s friends, and I don’t even remember the circumstances of the crime. I did, however, serve as a pallbearer at his funeral. I do remember that his family was devastated. They’re still deeply saddened by his death to this day.

I think of this every time I watch an episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Most of us don’t know anyone who has been murdered. Most of us have never encountered a slaying aside from hearing about it in the news. And if we did, the death would make a profound impact on our lives, especially if it was someone we held dear.

This is not a world that Murder, She Wrote inhabits.

On a lark I started watching episodes on Netflix. I like background noise when I’m working, and I’d already run through all the Star Treks. It was a favorite show of my mom, so it was familiar. ¹

But I view the show a lot differently now that I’m an adult. For the past few days I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly the moral rules of the Murder, She Wrote universe are.

For those not aware of the premise, Angela Lansbury plays a retired small-town Maine schoolteacher-turned-mystery-writer who moonlights as an amateur detective. Well, moonlights isn’t really the right term. She’s not Sam Spade. She doesn’t make any effort to seek out cases.

The way she pops at murder scenes makes her something of a cross between Forrest Gump and the Angel of Death.

Every week she’d arrive at a different locale on a shaky premise – visiting her hapless nephew Grady was a favorite plot kickoff device.² Although plots were strung from a constellation of other wealthy, famous and well-connected relatives and friends who made her the most cosmopolitan small-town schoolteacher in history.

Regardless of the setting, there was always a corpse by the end of the second act break. And everyone is, of course, a suspect. The body count alone makes it literally one of the most bloodthirsty shows in TV history, with more than 250 unfortunates sent to the morgue in a 12-year run.

Take that, Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

From Jessica Fletcher’s perspective, she resides in a hellish dystopia where murder is commonplace. She encounters dozens a year among just her circle of friends and family. Her vacations, business meetings, speaking engagements, familial visits, neighborly relationships – and probably trips to the fridge – are all marred by hangings, stabbings, cars going off a cliff, bludgeonings, poisonings and gunshots.

It’s a dark, Hobbesian world dominated with jealousy, rage, betrayals and greed where problems large and small are settled with with clan-like brutishness.

Even her idyllic hometown of Cabot Cove, Maine, isn’t immune. The murders that took place there over the run of the series gives it the highest murder rate in the world, higher even than Nicaragua.

What stands out, especially on a binge watch, is how nonplussed Jessica Fletcher is by all this mayhem she encounters. In a second-season episode, while on vacation, she witnesses a woman being pushed from a boat and drowned.

She’s completely unfazed by the experience, telling the sheriff, played by Tom Bosley affecting a terrible Maine accent, that she was fine. Having to investigate a killing while on vacation seems normal to her. The investigation is the vacation.

Despite the cheerful exterior and happy-go-lucky spunk, there’s something quite dark, sociopathic almost, about her character. She’s inexorably drawn to the depravity. This callousness led one of my cousins to dub the show “Murder, She Hopes.”

The show’s themes, in broad strokes, is meant to reflect small-town common sense winning out over big city sophistication. The crimes took place among a broad collection of “those guys” stereotypes – cattle ranchers, athletes, soap opera actors, wealthy layabouts, college academics (broadly acted with bad accents by the cream of the ’70s and ’80s C-List).³ Fletcher was just a mere visitor to their world, unaffected but judging.

But in actual function, the show could be read as endorsement of murder as a way to settle disputes. Rarely is it a tragedy. The victim is typically depicted as the worst person of the episode, a miserable sneering, scheming wreck of inhumanity who probably eats kittens for breakfast and lures children to their doom in a gingerbread house in the forest. The victim’s death almost always resolves the episode’s central conflict.

For example, in the episode Joshua Peabody Died Here, Possibly, a Donald Trump-style⁴ developer wants to despoil quaint Cabot Cove with a high-rise resort, enraging everyone in town.

By mid-episode he’s dead and by episode end so’s the development deal.

Murders on the show have preserved soap opera actors’ jobs from the evil producer who was firing them, prevented inheritance fraud, ended blackmail schemes, saved more than one Broadway play from closing, saved many a business … The list goes on.

When the killer is finally hauled off they are less like a criminal and more like someone who took one for the team.

The show managed to hide its essential darkness and revenge ethos behind a breezy tone epitomized by its jaunty tinkling-piano theme music. It pulled off this trick so well that it remained quite popular to the end with its core audience: little old ladies.

This was partly due to the “small town common sense” angle of Mrs. Fletcher’s snooping, but the show was harshly moral. The guilty parties were always brought to justice, and when cornered always confess their misdeeds.

None of that pesky “due process” or “temporary insanity pleas” or “liberal slap-on-the-wrist judges” to slow down the wheels of justice. Jessica Fletcher never has to spend days on the stand testifying. Evidence is never thrown out because of entrapment or some nosy amateur detective didn’t follow procedure.

To borrow a line from The Simpsons: She puts young people in jail. Where they belong.

Add in the fact that justice also included the rough justice of the invariably terrible victim were finally getting their just desserts.

Then again, there’s another possibility: Jessica Fletcher is the most prolific serial killer in American history. Consider the evidence:

• The crimes occurred among Fletcher’s close circle of friends and family.
• She was always in the same city or in close proximity to where the murders occurred.
• She was regularly given access to the crime scenes allowing her to plant or manipulate evidence.
• Likewise, she was able to gain the trust of law enforcement officials, allowing her to discreetly steer the course of the investigation.
• A psychopathic personality would want to be present to witness the aftermath of the crime and narcissistically manipulate people to gain further sick pleasure.
• The people arrested for the murders were victims of Fletcher’s frame job.
• The show is told from Fletcher’s perspective. If she was indeed a killer, that would make her an unreliable narrator. The “confessions” were simply her imagination.

If this is indeed the case, then hats off to J.B. Fletcher. She was far more clever than any of us give her credit for.

1. I know this is just excuse making. Only God can judge me.
2. She had a shit-ton of nieces and nephews during the series run. Unsurprisingly, most were accused of murder at one time or another.
3. A fifth season episode set in Jamaica with both French and English characters was a veritable cavalcade of bad accents.
4. Hey, whatever happened to Donald Trump anyway? Anyone know?