Wow. This is a momentous anniversary - a whole quarter of a century has passed since MSW debuted on this very night (in ten minutes, actually - it's 7:50 pm EDT as I write this). As this day approached, I felt certain that I would have something profound to say about it, and yet now that it's here, mostly what's going through my mind is, "Wow. Twenty-five years. Twenty-five years! Twenty-five years?!?"
It feels like a long time ... and yet like very little time at all, at least when I sit down to watch my MSW DVDs. This is to the show's credit - its writers, its producers, and of course to Angela Lansbury. An online reviewer speaking of the show (I wish I could remember which one) noted that except for the cars and the hairstyles, the episodes stand the test of time surprisingly well, playing just a well today in 2009 as they did back in the mid-80's. I find that this is largely true. The exception is that back in the day, most of the crime dramas on the airwaves shared MSW's relatively benign handling of violence and cozy story lines - think Matlock, Diagnosis Murder, Crazy Like a Fox. Now such shows are rare. In the current age of graphically violent, angst-ridden dramas (think The Sopranos, Law and Order: SVU, the entire CSI franchise) one must look long and hard to find a series that can legitimately claim to hold aloft MSW's torch. Only two spring to mind, both of which are products of the USA Network ("characters welcome"): Monk, and Psych.
When "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes" debuted, I was eleven years old, my family still pulled in a couple of handfuls of channels with a roof-mounted antenna for free, and reality tv was the evening news. Now I'm thirty-six, I pay for fifty-odd cable channels (the basic package), and get my news via the internet, courtesy of the online edition of the New York Times. But are we really better off? What do we have to show for our hundreds of cable channels? A relentless, mind-numbing horde of "reality" shows, for the most part. Sure, there are some gems out there - Psych and Burn Notice on USA and Dirty Jobs and Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel are the four I follow these days. But as much as I love the Discovery Channel, if I see them produce one more reality-based reiteration of Deadliest Catch, I think I'll swear off seafood forever. How many real-life shows about commercial fishing do we need?
It's enough to make anyone a bit nostalgic for the fall prime time lineup of 1984, and Murder, She Wrote, now twenty-five years young, in particular.
