Musings on the Murdoch Mysteries

Canadian television doesn't get a lot of respect from the academic and critical film and television community. The BFI and Wayne State University Press, despite their ample list of monographs in their BFI TV Classics and TV Milestones series on American and British television shows, have not published a single volume on a Canadian television show. I find this not only interesting but also unfortunate because, of the limited number of new television series I watch these days, the two shows I enjoy the most are two Canadian TV shows, Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries.

Both Heartland (CBC, 2007), the contemporary family saga of the Bartletts and their Alberta ranch, a show that has elements of the rural and pastoralist myth in it, and Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV, 2008-2011, CBC, 2-11-), a Canadian mystery series set in Victorian and Edwardian Toronto, have been very successful by any measure. Both Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries have been, for example, on air for thirteen seasons and been commissioned by the CBC for a fourteenth. Both are currently the longest running drama series on Canadian television with 214 and 211 episodes respectively. You would think this would garner at least a modicum of attention from the academic and critical community but it hasn't as of yet.

In the rest of this essay I want to focus my gaze on Murdoch Mysteries and the various levels on which Murdoch functions or "works".

The Production Level:
ITV's involvement brings with it quite a pedigree in adapted detective fiction including Inspector Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, DCI Banks, Vera... Another thing that struck me about the show is how like classic Doctor Who Murdoch is. It simultaneously entertains and educates.

The Narrative Level:
Murdoch Mysteries is centred around the various cases of Precinct Four of the Toronto Constabulary its detective, Inspector William Murdoch, its constables, particularly Constable George Crabtree, its coroners, Dr. Julia Ogden, Dr, Emily Grace, and, once again, Dr. Ogden, its Inspector, Thomas Brackenreid, and the criminals, politicians, members of the Toronto Constabulary who intersect with the main characters of the series.

The narrative level of Murdoch contains the character traits and character arcs not only of the central characters of the show but also recurring characters who reappear on the show, some criminal, some not, like Eva Pearce, Terrance Myers, James Pendrick, and a brilliant young man who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes. When these recurring characters reappear it is like seeing old friends even if these old friends have murder and mayhem on their minds.

One of the interesting things about Murdoch, given that it is a show grounded in history, is that among the characters who we viewers see as we watch the series are historical figures and incidents from the Canadian, British, European, and American pasts such as Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agnes Macphail, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven, Clara Brett Martin, Florence Nightingale Graham, Mark Twain, Harry Houdini, the Wright Brothers, Wilfred Laurier, Emma Goldman, Prince Alfred, W.C. Fields, the Canadian and British women's suffrage movement, and the Great Fire of Toronto of 1904, among others.

As is typically the case with ensemble arc driven television shows, Murdoch takes viewers on a journey that intersects with the journeys of its characters. Those who become involved with the show have a lot to chose from as they intersect with the characters of the show. Will Julia and William finally get married, they might wonder. Will George find someone, they might ask themselves. Will George's Book become a success? Will Julia and the suffragettes succeed?

The Genre Level:
Murdoch is a drama, a tragedy, a satire, a parody, a comedy, a romance, a detective and mystery show, science fiction, steampunk, costume, adaptation, horror. The show has a wonderfully wry sense of humour.

The Historical Level:
As I noted Murdoch is set in Victorian and post-Victorian Toronto. This gives Murdoch a different flavour when compared with the other numerous detective shows on Canadian, British, and American television. While the Toronto of Murdoch is dominated by Anglo-Saxons and WASP culture, the city, thanks to immigration, is becoming ever larger, ever noisier, and ever more culturally, demographically, and socially diverse. There are references to the various neighbourhoods of the city, the various ethic groups of the city, the various classes of the city, and the various historical and cultural geographic landmarks of the city.

As I noted earlier, we meet, in the course of the series, various well known historical events and historical figures and various not so well known historical events and figures. For those with a historical and social scientific bent like myself, Murdoch is a kind of historical and social scientific pursuit.

The Nationalist Level:
Like the classic CTV series Due South (1994-1999), Murdoch plays with the notion and idea of Canadianess. I might add here that Inspector Murdoch is kind of a RCMP Constable Benton Fraser, one of the main characters of Due South, for the 21st century. In fact, Murdoch's half brother seems to me to be an intentional chop off the old Fraser block. One of the themes that runs throughout Murdoch, just as it, according to some, was and is a central theme of Canadian history and culture, is the difference between Canada and the behemoth to its south, the United States.

As was the case with the Canadian references in Due South, most prominently to Diefenbaker, one suspects that the references to Canadian history, Canadian culture, and Canadian historical figures, is something American viewers are unlikely to get save perhaps those that are well known south of the border. Winnifed "Freddy" Pink, in her younger form, for example, seems to be a reference to Anne of Green Gables fame, a historical reference some Americans might get.

Some might find it interesting that Murdoch, like Due South, has a firm grasp of American history, something that living next to the US and being inundated with American media, given the geographical realities of Canadian settlement, certainly promotes. Canadians, claim many, including film maker Michael Moore, seem to have a firmer grasp of American history and culture than Americans have of Canadian history and culture.

Murdoch is somewhat similar to Forgotten Silver (1995), the Peter Jackson and Costa Botes faux documentary, that played into and played with New Zealand nationalism and ethnocentrism offending some when they learned the documentary was actually fictional, in the process. As was the case with Forgotten Silver, where a Kiwi was first in flight, the developer of the moving camera shot, and the creator of colour cinema, the character of James Pendrick, a Canadian, is first in flight, the creator of the electric car, and the developer of a new and dangerous weapon. Like Forgotten Silver, Murdoch plays into and plays with notions of Canadian nationalism in what some might call a reflexive, parodic, satiric and postmodernist way.

The Parodic and Satirical Level:
One of the fascinating things about Murdoch is that though it is set among the British Canadian Protestant elite, middle class, and working class cultures, and Murdoch is a Victorian gentleman, he is also, as Brackenreid periodically notes, a "Papist", a Roman Catholic, an outsider, an other.

Murdoch pokes fun at Canadianess and Canadian nationalism in a number of ways. When Prime Minister Laurier walks into Precinct Four one of the constables does not recognise him. Is this a poke at contemporary Canadian knowledge of Canadian history?

Murdoch undercuts Canadian nationalism, for example, by referencing the breaking of a treaty between the government of Ontario and Ontario's First Peoples in 1903 when silver is discovered in First People's territory in an episode where Murdoch and Crabtree investigate a murder that takes them into First People's lands. So much for Canadian exceptionalism.

Murdoch also undercuts notions of Canadian exceptionalism by pointing up the similarities between the Canadian spy Terrance Meyers and his American cousins, Very LeCarreesque.

The Intellectual Level:
Murdoch has, at times, a moral heft to it as when Murdoch and Inspector Chief Constable Giles debate law, justice, and loyalty in a deeply tragic episode.

The Postmodern Level:
Murdoch plays with us 20th and 21st century viewers and our popular culture capital in addition to our historical capital. The female comedian in the vaudeville episode, for example, recalls Joan Rivers. Murdoch references Hitchcock, the film D.O.A, and the Steven Spielberg film Raiders of the Lost Ark, among others, and actually simulates them. Additionally, the show makes us, I suspect, connect and perhaps even laugh at Crabtree's discovery of pizza (by the bite), hamburgers, and hot dogs, and one of the characters' dismissal of beef on bread.

Murdoch, which is fairly historically accurate, also plays with history in a kind of present meets past way. Murdoch, for example, invents the lie detector and the taser, amongst a host of crime fighting technologies and categorises what we today call serial killers as sequential killers.

A lifesize replica of Hagia Sophia and the Holy Grail in Markham Ontario? A killer corset in Toronto? Valerie Solanas before Valerie Solanas? H.P. Lovecraft and Toronto's Edwardian goths?

A note on the Halloween episode Sir.Sir?Sir!!! (12:6, 2018):
What a fun and humourous episode. If the comments on IMDb about this episode are a guide, those who watched it and commented on it at the IMDb website seemed to have missed the episode's indebtedness to the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Apparently, if this is prologue past and present, many are not as aware of postmodernist intertextuality as some would like us to think. I suppose we can, given this, why many of the "reviewers" didn't seem to have grasped the fun, humour, and parodic aspects of the episode. Nor, of course, do many of the younger viewers have any sense of media history. Welcome to the brave new digital world where those who have the world literally at their fingertips show little in the way of inquisitiveness.

Envoi
Murdoch Mysteries, what a wonderfully fun television show that is also quite moving at times thanks to its Buffylike emotional depth...