Episode 12 - "Broadway Malady"
I was prepared not to like this one, but it won me over. Jessica comes to visit her nephew Grady on the Great White Way. Jessica gets embroiled in a super dysfunctional Broadway production - abusive directors, has-been starlets making a last-gasp comeback, the has-been's talented daughter's debut, a shady producer... the works.
Things get complicated quick when the daughter is shot on the street in what appears to be a mugging ... but nothing is simple on these shows. Things get doubly complicated when the has-been starlet appears to commit suicide. Yet again it's up to Jessica to unravel some really ugly family dynamics and solve a murder.
In a strange cameo, Milton Berle (!) appears as a Broadway know-it-all named Lew Feldman. A show like this doesn't give him much room to do his patented schtick, and as a result he doesn't come across as funny or even really fun in any way, a shame. The son in the Broadway family is Gregg Henry, who is currently in Scandal and has also appeared in shows as diverse as The Killing, Gilmore Girls, Matlock, and LA Law. As we've seen before, good actors get rewarded on Murder, She Wrote and Gregg Henry returns as several different characters over the run of the show - IMDB says seven episodes! Impressive.
Episode 13 - "Murder to a Jazz Beat"
Unknown/Missing - this episode is listed both on Wikipedia and IMDB, but isn't on Netflix's listings for the first season of the show. I'll look for it, and if I find it this stub will vanish.
Episode 14 - "My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean"
A truly strange episode, yet also quite appealing in its oddness - the whole episode seems to be a sort of satire on Love Boat. Jessica's niece Pamela (a beautiful blonde, and the show takes great pains to emphasize her good looks in a long lingering opening that shows her diving in a swimming pool in a very tight bathing suit) is rocked by the suicide of her husband. Jessica suggests they go on a cruise together (!), get away from Pam's troubles. So far, so good.
But things immediately get strange - Pam starts getting tons of letters and gifts and signs and whatnot from her dead husband (!!). It's genuinely spooky at first, and even when Jessica figures out it's someone trying to mess with her niece, it's still pretty disconcerting. Jessican ultimately enlists the captain of the cruise liner to help her catch a murderer. The Love Boat-esque side plots go nowhere, which is part of the show's oddness.
Side note: this episode features the only time the audience ever meets one of Jessica's siblings, her brother Marshall.
The captain is played by Leslie Nielsen! It's so odd seeing him play a completely straight role - not a goof in sight here. The beautiful Pamela is played by Belinda Montgomery, known for many television appearances, and especially for her parts in Doogie Howser, MD, and Miami Vice. Comic relief here is provided by Vicki Lawrence (!), who couldn't be more out of place in this episode; even so, she's still funny. Her comic partner on the show is Jo Anne Worley, known for her many turns on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.
Episode 15 - "Paint Me a Murder"
Jessica travels to the Mediterranean in this tale of artists, greed, and murder by crossbow. Jessica is invited by her friend Diego Santana, a famous painter, to come to his island for his 60th birthday party. Pretty quickly, someone tries to kill him, and Jessica and his friends are put on high alert.
And it's not long before he actually is murdered, and Jessica is forced to investigate... meanwhile, the list of crimes expands to arson. The island locale sets this one apart in a good way, but a plot that sputters puts a ceiling on things. The tension seems artificial in this one - when bad things happen all the characters basically cry out in unison, "OH NO" when the viewer (or at least this viewer) is left thinking "...so?".
Also, by this point in the season wouldn't Jessica start being alarmed at the number of murders she is present for?? Or is this something that has happened her whole life, which partially explains why she's so good at solving mysteries? At least they are helpfully spaced out a week apart.
Painter Diego Santana (great name!) is played very well by Cesar Romero, the great actor whose career dates back to the early 1930s. I remember being a kid and seeing him in the John Ford-directed Shirley Temple movie Wee Willie Winkie, which was on Turner Classic Movies the first year we got cable (1994?). In additional to very many movies, Romero is also well known for the Zorro television show (1959), being the delightful and campy original Joker on television's Batman (1966), and as Peter Stavros on Falcon Crest (1985). Interestingly, Murder, She Wrote seems to be his final acting credit.
The painter's son is played by Fernando Allende, an actor who is still very active on Spanish-speaking television, and who I remember from a role in 1989's Beverly Hills Brats with Peter Billingsley and Martin Sheen. Also notable in the cast is singer Robert Goulet! I saw him in a revival of Camelot in 1997 with my high school sweetheart and her mother (thank you, many years later, Cecilia), and he does well with a small role here. Golden Age actor Stewart Granger also appears, known for classic movies like The Prisoner of Zenda (1952).
Episode 16 - "Tough Guys Don't Die"
This is definitely a highlight of the first season - an episode that gets it right in every way. It's also an homage/satire of The Maltese Falcon, one of the first film noirs and a great detective movie starring Bogart. Jessica hires a private detective named Archie Miles to investigate an old sensational murder case that she wants to use for a book (Quick note: The name of the murdered detective in The Maltese Falcon is Miles Archer). This detective ends up dead, shot in his office by a persons unknown.
Quickly, two people declare their intent on solving the death of the hardworking detective - Jessica, and his partner Harry McGraw, played to the gritty hardboiled hilt by none other than Jerry Orbach (he's phenomenal). Jessica and McGraw hit it off immediately: she respects his hardened, cynical worldview and up-all-night work ethic; he respects her ingenuity, her cleverness, and her refusal to quit against all odds. They make a great pair.
They investigate by chasing down all the leads in the final three cases that Miles was working - Jessica's long-closed murder case, an investigation into a feminist women's magazine publisher, and an investigation into a seemingly adulterous contractor. Which thread will lead to the murderer?
Besides the fantastic Orbach (known also for Law & Order and movies like 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors), standouts here include John McMartin as the publisher's husband, and a really great Paul Winfield as the jaded police lieutenant who is OK with McGraw "taking out [the murderer] so a scumbag lawyer won't find a loophole in court" or something to that effect. Winfield is known for many roles across TV and film, but I remember him best as the police lieutenant from the original Terminator (1984), who keeps trying to tell Sarah Conner there are no such things as Terminators, and - sadly - is killed shortly afterward, in the famous "I'll be back" massacre.
Fun fact: The character of Harry Graw was so popular, that it prompted the only Murder, She Wrote spinoff show (!): The Law and Harry McGraw, which lasted one year ('87-'88) on CBS. I'll have to dig it up one of these days.
Episode 17 - "Sudden Death"
This was a complete surprise - Jessica Fletcher inherits a professional football team! I can only imagine Lansbury's bemused smile upon reading this script. It turns out that she doesn't inherit the entire team, only a key 4% of the stock, enough for a controlling vote on whether the team stays in town or leaves for a bigger city - apparently it's set in New Mexico.
The episode revolves around Jessica's awkward yet amused interactions with the world of '80s football, which is to say: beefy braindead athletes drinking hard and partying harder... until the businessman who wanted to move the team is found dead, drowned in the team's whirlpool. Jessica does her usual thing and investigates, quickly poking holes in the shoddy police investigation and finding clues that rapidly point her in the right direction... but not before her own life is put in danger! Humorously, it's almost death by sauna (!) for our Jessica.
A lot of great actors here. John Beck, television veteran known best perhaps as Mark Graison on Dallas. Player "Tank" Mason is played fantastically by Dick Butkus, the famous Hall of Fame linebacker, primarily with the Chicago Bears. Caitlyn Jenner is here! As Zak Farrell, the very likeable player on injured reserve whose deaf adopted daughter takes a liking to Jessica. This show really shows some sudden curveballs at the viewer sometimes - whole complex subplots are thrown off in the blink of an eye.
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