Recently, I watched an episode of the Canadian television show Murdoch Mysteries, which has run on Citytv and the CBC since 2008. The episode was entitled ‘Clean Hands” (CBC, 16:6, 17 October 2023). In that episode two of the central characters in the show, Murdoch himself played by Yannick Bison (once I came across an American “reactor” on YouTube who called him bison after the beast), and Julia, his doctor wife played by Helene Joy, infiltrate two Mennonite communities, one more “liberal” than the other, near Berlin (now Kitchener thanks to English Canadian nationalism during World War I) Ontario. Murdoch and Julia become participant spies in two Mennonite communities in order to find out who murdered a young Mennonite lad who was about to get married and who, because of his more secular ideological bent, was a circle who did not fully fit into the square pegs that were these two old order Mennonite communities.
IMDb is a database founded in 1990 by a British computer engineer. It had its coming out party on the world wide web in 1993. It is a useful if imperfect database that contains information on films, which was its earliest focus, television shows, podcasts, home video, video games, and streaming content. I occasionally go to it to learn more about films and television shows. One of the things I am sometimes interested in which IMDb often contains information on is where films and TV programmes are shot. I wanted to ascertain where the episode of Murdoch I just watched was filmed so I went to the IMDb Murdoch “Clean Hands” page.
I was unfortunately unable able to access the information I was looking for. I did, however, find something else that interested and intrigued me even more. As I wandered around the IMDb Murdoch “Clean Hands" page I happened upon a “review" of the episode—there were five in total at the time—which I found simultaneously interesting, informative, and problematic. This “review” authored by "Steiner-Sam" entitled “Gross Misinformation of early 20th-century Ontario Mennonites” claimed that the CBC, the network that commissioned Murdoch and broadcasts it it in Canada, had done a “pitiful” job in representing Mennonite history and culture in Ontario. He claimed that Ontario Mennonites do not live in “colonies”, that they do not use matchmakers, that they do not avoid the wives of others, that they do not shun for disagreements, and that they do not lock their unwed and pregnant daughters in attics,
There are several empirical problems with this “review”. First, the Canadian public television network CBC does not make Murdoch. The CBC commissions the show and as a consequence does have some say over the show as a result. The show is actually made by Shaftesbury Films—Rogers Sports and Media was also involved in making the show in its first five seasons before it moved to the CBC after Citytv, which is owned by Rogers, cancelled it. Shaftesbury is a private corporation founded by Christine Jenkins, who gets an executive producer credit on the show as a result, in 1987. It is Shaftesbury who hires the actors, hires the writers, and hires the craftspeople associated with the show with, of course, varying amounts of input other interested sources. By the way, Shaftesbury, is aided in their financing of the show thanks to Canadian and Ontario tax credit policies and funds from the Canadian Television Fund.
Second, Mennonites do live in colonies. Russian Mennonites, those Mennonites who migrated to and settled in Russia as a result of persecution in Mitteleuropa, lived in colonies like Chortitza and Molotschna in the Russian Empire. Some of the members of this Old Colony Mennonite community would eventually settle in Canada, Mexico, and Paraguay after leaving Russia in the early 20th century to avoid serving in the military. Mennonites have historically been non-violent. Interestingly, many of the Old Colony Mennonites who settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia including in urban areas like Winnipeg (now the city with the largest number of Mennonites globally) and Vancouver, later re-migrated to Mexico and Paraguay after receiving state promises to avoid the socialised for conformity practises of English Canadian schools, including the English Canadian British nationalist faith, and, of course, military conscription.
Third, like the term “colony”, which can mean many things including a geographical part of a colonised state under the political control of another, the original thirteen US colonies, a group of people who identify with each other while living in a foreign place, and a settlement in which people live close together—the last two definitions can clearly be used to describe separatist Old Colony Mennonites in the Prairies and separatist (colony) old order Mennonites in Ontario —the term matchmaker, someone who arranges marriages or relationships, can also take different forms. Matchmaker, for instance, can refer to a position, usually a female position, which is institutionalised and hence official in communities or it can refer a role in communities which is not officially institutionalised and which functions on an unofficial level as opposed to official level. Old Colony Mennonites, including those in Canada, like many other if not every other community across the globe, have unofficial matchmakers, unofficial matchmakers who can be recognised by the community as “official” in an unofficial way.
Fourth, Old Colony Mennonites do shun. As is the case in other old order Anabaptist groups, those who “stray” in Old Colony communities are, at least officially, initially reprimanded by a deacon. Those who still refuse to conform can be denied or “set back” from communion. This makes them outside of the fold, people who are shunned. If conformity is not forthcoming after these forms of discipline the offending party can be excommunicated.
Fifth, the episode does not portray all Mennonites as locking their unwed and pregnant daughters in attics. It portrays the hiding of an unwed and pregnant daughter, a daughter who the family hopes will be married off in the future after she gives birth, as the response of one Mennonite family to an unwanted out of wedlock pregnancy.
Finally, let’s not forget that Murdoch Mysteries is a fictional television show that uses a host of strategies, many of them meant to manipulate the emotions of viewers such as tone, genre, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody, music, and editing to manipulate viewers. Murdoch is not by any stretch of the imagination a documentary about early 20th century Old Order Mennonite life in Ontario and does not pretend to be so. It doesn’t even pretend to be a realist text. In fact, no film or TV programme, documentary or otherwise, is ever “real” or ever can be “real” making the notion that films or TV programmes can be or should be “real” an ideology that ultimately cannot be achieved in films and TV shows making the fetish of “realism” the film and television equivalent of the Holy Grail. Given this, if one wants to actually learn more about early 20th century Ontario Mennonites, one can—though most won’t, of course—take advantage of the fact that there are a number of excellent academic studies of North American and Canadian Mennonites out there in scholarly book land that can be read by those interested in Mennonite history, Mennonite society, and Mennonite culture.
IMDb is, of course, not the only social media site on the world wide web that give the reflective a strong sense that human life and its adjuncts—its political, economic, demographic, and geographic cultural ideologies or ways of perceiving—are humorous and at the same time frightening in an enlightening kind of way. There is also YouTube which, I suspect, is even more visited than IMDb, and there are also social media sites like Instagram and TikTok. What all of these social media sites say about human nature, about human gullibility, about the ideologically constructed blindness that impacts the human “race”, and about researching in a digital age that makes research easy, is a question I will leave you to answer if preferably in an empirical way.
For further empirical information on the Old Order Mennonites and Old Order Anabaptists see Harry Loewen and Steven Nolt, Through Fire and Water: An Overview of Mennonite History (Scottdale, PA and Waterloo, Ontario: Herald Press, revised edition, 2010) and Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman, On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
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