Twelve years and 264 episodes after it first appeared, “Murder, She Wrote” ends life as a series Sunday. But not without engaging in a little uncharacteristic subversiveness, placing hand in front of mouth to tell its version of a sly joke on the medium that considered the show not hip enough for the room.
The Angela Lansbury detective program, the longest-running dramatic series on prime-time television, calls its final episode “Death by Demographics,” a phrase that neatly sums up the fate of “Murder, She Wrote” and at least hints at some of the anger its principals are entitled to feel.
The story is of Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher helping solve a murder at a San Francisco radio station that is dumping Puccini in favor of Pearl Jam. But the message is in lines that take dead aim at advertising’s conventional wisdom that old equals stingy and stodgy.
“Murder, She Wrote” is leaving television because of a New McCarthyism, to use a phrase coined by TV programming guru Brandon Tartikoff. It wasn’t that the show couldn’t get enough viewers, but that the viewers it could get were old enough to know that Charlie McCarthy was the dummy who sat on the lap of Candice Bergen’s father.
And in the realpolitik of modern TV advertising, Madison Avenue won’t try to sell Pepsi to people it thinks spend their days clipping coupons for Depends.
The loss isn’t primarily Lansbury’s, or CBS’, or even that of the experienced viewers who were the show’s core audience. The loss is network television’s, which sees one more shrinking of its breadth of programming, one more answer to the question of why viewers turn to cable, or the Internet, or betting for pennies at pinochle parties.
“MSW” never was overwhelming creatively. Eschewing hand-held cameras, layered storytelling, ensemble casts and writing that gave full rein to its characters’ demons, “Murder, She Wrote” instead committed and, via its matronly, mystery-writer heroine, solved a little murder each week.
“It was a crossword puzzle, a thinking person’s show,” David Shaw, the series’ co-executive producer and Lansbury’s stepson, said in an interview this week. “People felt comfortable with it. They knew at the end they were going to get a smile and everything would be all right.”
The series proved there are a lot of people out there who prefer little crossword puzzles to the wrenching new journalism that is much of modern TV drama.
By Nielsen ratings standards, “MSW” wasn’t just a success, but a phenomenon, a top 10 finisher in its first year, 1984-85, and never out of the top 15 after that–until this past season, when CBS moved it from its comfortable Sunday home after “60 Minutes” to go head-to-head on Thursday with the kids on NBC’s “Friends.” (There, it was running about 50th.) For its final four episodes, as if in contrition, CBS moved the show back to 7 p.m. Sundays (WBBM-Ch. 2).
But it never was the right kind of Top 10 finisher. Advertisers and networks don’t care so much about raw numbers as they do about who those numbers signify. That is why, a year ago February, when “Murder, She Wrote” and “Friends” both were drawing about 15.5 million households per week, a 30-second ad on “MSW” cost $95,000 and those same 30 seconds on “Friends” retailed for $137,000–44 percent more.
The difference? “Friends’ ” audience was younger, comprised of 75 percent more people between ages 18 and 49, and in the advertising community’s view of things, more malleable to the idea of, say, buying a new sport drink.
An “NYPD Blue” in a similar unfair pickle might have gone out in a grittily realistic blaze of bullets–a killing spree, say, at a television network’s headquarters prompted by cancellation of the shooter’s favorite show. “Murder, She Wrote” contents itself with a neat alliterative phrase and a few pointed lines in the episode itself.
“Wasn’t the Lexus a new product a few years ago?” says one of the people at the episode’s radio station arguing against the demographic makeover. “I don’t see too many teenagers driving those babies around.”
It bows out not only with the trademark Lansbury chuckle at the end, but by offering its vision of a better world: In the end the station can go back to its old format because “advertisters seem finally to have discovered the idea that people like us are an invaluable segment of the market,” says guest star David Ogden Stiers, playing a classical deejay forced to pair with a sort of Mancow-like newcomer.
Shaw said his 70-year-old stepmom, whom he calls “Angie,” was eager to move on to other projects, anyway. It was only “MSW’s” great ratings, he said, that kept her coming back. When the move to Thursday took care of that, “Angie said, `Well, why should I do this?’ “
Why, indeed. The show’s gentility and adherence to formula wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. I never tuned in an episode for pleasure (though when I did so for work, I appreciated the program’s craft and confidence).
I will miss “Murder, She Wrote,” nonetheless, and so should all of us who groan when a diner disappears from our neighborhood and a McDonald’s goes up in its place.
The new longest-running series depicting fictional characters on prime-time TV: “Married . . . with Children.”
– Seeing Red: “Ruby Ridge: An American Tragedy,” the poignant and pertinent new CBS mini-series (8 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday, WBBM-Ch. 2), is the story of a prophecy fulfilling itself.
Randy Wayne Weaver (Randy Quaid) was an almost casually hateful man, a violent, paranoid racist who resorted to thievery and dealing in illegal guns to support his wife and three children in their vision of the promised land, a handmade house on a ridge in the northern tip of Idaho.
His wife, Vicki (Laura Dern), brought a smug fundamentalist Christianity to the family’s psychic stew. And when federal agents tried to arrest Weaver for his gun misdeeds, the Weavers’ unwillingness to cooperate led to the violent confrontations with government authorities that have turned their story, along with the Branch Davidian Waco saga, into some people’s idea of evidence of a government run amok with power.
The evidence seems clear in the movie and the richly detailed book on which it is based–“Every Knee Shall Bend,” by Jess Walter–that the Weavers’ tragedy, and the symbols that the two dead family members have become, could have been avoided by a more prudent government effort against them, though Walter sees more ineptitude and misunderstanding than ill will on the government’s part.
It is a measure of the skills of Dern and Quaid, and the careful storytelling of screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd and director Roger Young, that even when the couple have their children march like little Nazis in front of the house of neighbors they’re feuding with, you never see them as anything less than human.
As twisted as the Weavers’ views are, and as straightforward as the movie is in portraying their ugliness, Dern and Quaid infuse those beliefs with an organic fervor that allows some small measure of empathy for them. And Kirsten Dunst (“Interview with the Vampire”) as their eldest daughter gives a chilling picture of the bright-eyed fanaticism of the youthful indoctrinate.
