Kimberly Emerson

My cat doesn’t talk a lot,  unless I’m taking too long to put out new food. (There’s always food out. That is not her point.) Sometimes, I’ll switch the TV on to break up the silence. Lately, the background noise has come from Murder, She Wrote.

Everyone knows Angela Lansbury’s long-running mystery series. Beginning in 1984, she starred in twelve seasons of conundrums closed in convenient capsules of fifty-two minutes or less, cementing her demure mystery writer/detective into our cultural lexicon. Even people who’ve never watched the show understand references to Jessica Fletcher and Cabot Cove. Ms. Lansbury was in her late fifties when the show started. I was in my teens at the time, but as a viewer, I was an anomaly even then. I remember the show being a favorite with everyone’s parents, and I think the producers were fine with that. Jessica’s parade of nieces and nephews – and they are legion – offer some appeal to the younger demographic, but I don’t think youth was ever the show’s target market. Why not lean unapologetically toward older viewers? As a group, people over fifty have a lot more money at their disposal than teenagers do, and once they attach themselves to a show, they are very faithful. You’d have to talk to someone who understands sales a whole lot better than I do for an explanation of why teenagers get courted so often by advertising dollars.

As a piece of our past, the 1980s are a hard decade to love sometimes. The “Me” decade. Most people probably associate the time with either Michael Douglas proclaiming “Greed is good” in Wall Street or Matthew Broderick playing hooky with panache in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but me? I might think of Jessica Fletcher.

There are things about the era that make me cringe, and no, I’m not thinking of the clothes. Yes, the jeans are alarmingly high-waisted and some of the shoulder pads could put out an eye. But the worst reminders from these old shows are of the attitudes of the time. The 1960s and 1970s pushed and shoved at our collective conscience, pointing out our prejudices about skin color, gender, gender preference and physical ability. The 1980s brought a resurgence of conservatism. America wanted to worry less about our problems and more about the Soviets. “Less is more” disappeared as a mindset. Station wagons gave way to SUVs. Sodas got supersized. Hairstyles inflated before our very eyes (sorry about that hole in the ozone layer). People who talked about societal problems were troublemakers, right up there with women who used the term Ms.

Television gets a bad rap for oversimplifying things, but as my feminist eyes observed in this case, Murder, She Wrote reminded me that life is complex.

Jessica would never define herself as a feminist, and in many ways she’s a character designed not to offend. She’s a widow living in a small town, and repeatedly states that she has no desire for fame or glory. The first episode shows us that she became a best-selling author entirely by accident. She wrote her first book just to keep busy after her husband, Frank, died, and let her nephew, Grady, read it. He sends it off to a publisher without telling her, the publisher adores it, and then she’s a household name. She never admits to the sin of ambition. While she runs into a statistically improbable number of eligible, attractive mature men – we’ll get back to that in a minute –  she never actually dates any of them. More than once, she states her preference for being addressed as “Mrs.” Fletcher. None of that Ms. nonsense for her.

However, the sweet older widow is not the only facet to this character. She makes a full and rewarding life on her own. While it isn’t her fault she became a famous mystery novelist, it is her fault she stays one. She makes time to write, she edits and critiques other writers’ stories, she travels all over the country and in some episodes the world in order to promote her work. Visits with her copious nieces and nephews often coincide with book-signing tours or literary conferences. In her gracious way, she butts into police investigations on a regular basis. Some of the police personnel – almost all male – appreciate her help. The ones in Cabot Cove have learned to live with the assistance. Authorities in other cities, however, find it annoying and say so, which does not stop Jessica from going on her merry crime-solving way.

For the most part, Jessica’s relationships with men are strictly intellectual. She prefers it this way, mostly because no one can measure up to her late husband. Also, the first distinguished older gentleman who flirts with her turns out to be a killer, which many of us find off-putting. Aside from that, however, Hollywood clings firm, even now, to the idea that older women cannot possibly hold any sexual allure, and Jessica doesn’t challenge the status quo. The young ones defer to her motherly judgment, and the older ones admire her from a chaste distance. In their recurring roles, Jerry Orbach and Wayne Rogers both treat her as a beloved elder who might fall and break a hip if they aren’t there to catch her. They are, in truth, only ten and eight years younger than she is, respectively. Were the genders reversed, they would be considered excellent romantic prospects, but they both hover solicitously in case she might need their assistance stepping up that nasty curb. The stringent stereotypes for mature women hold firm.

…Right up till Len Cariou walks in.

Mr. Cariou plays MI6 secret agent Michael Hagarty with an Irish accent and a degree of charm that I believe is actually illegal in New England. (MI6 or MI5, depending on the episode. Methinks the writers were a tad confused.) Why the British agent has an Irish accent, we don’t know. He could hail from Northern Ireland and thus be a British subject, but we’re never actually told his origin story. Fortunately, he’s so much fun to watch, we don’t really care. His name in the credits caught my attention – if I didn’t know he co-starred with Ms. Lansbury in Stephen Sondheim’s gruesome Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the Broadway police would revoke my musical theatre buff status. Mr. Cariou doesn’t look like your average James Bond – more like a nice older gent whose ancestry might include the occasional leprechaun – but he clearly has Bond’s charisma. Whenever he and Jessica get within ten feet of one another, they seem to have a difficult time keeping their hands off each other. Which is interesting, because according to IMDB.com, Len Cariou is fourteen years younger than Angela Lansbury. The age difference is never mentioned. The only time Michael refers to his age at all is to complain that Jessica is asking questions about someone fifteen years his junior. Like the rest, he never actually obtains even a real kiss from Jessica. (Well, the rest except for one. Five points to the first person who can tell me the one man who broke the rule.) The difference is, Michael Hagarty refuses to comply with the platonic pretense. He asks her to dinner, adding, “After which, I trust we will both be on our worst behavior.” While trying to prevent a secret communique from reaching enemy agents, he informs her, “When we’ve got some time, we really need to have a talk about us.” At the end of that episode, he invites her to go with him to his next assignment in Singapore. “It’ll be a perfect chance for us to…” he says before going silent and waggling his eyebrows at her.

It takes moxie to waggle your eyebrows at Angela Lansbury, my friends.

Mr. Cariou guest stars in seven episodes. He may have had other commitments that prevented further appearances, but I have to wonder if the writers just couldn’t think of any way that Jessica and Michael could spend more time in the same room and not engage in some extracurricular activities.

I don’t know that I’ve ever had more fun researching a column than I did this one, combing through Youtube for clips on the making of Murder, She Wrote. Listening to Ms. Lansbury and the producers talk about the show opened my eyes. I think of Jessica Fletcher as a prototypical older woman, but the producers beamed with pride about how this show “broke all the rules.” The thing of it is, they’re right. Up to then, there hadn’t been a mystery series with a woman as protagonist. The producers talk about how, even if a show had a woman investigating, she always turned to the men around her to solve the problem. “We wanted to change all that.” They banked on Angela Lansbury as a viewer favorite, and they weren’t disappointed. Having some status, however, Ms. Lansbury got more say in the development of the character than the usual actor. “In the original concept, Jessica Fletcher was probably a little bit more eccentric, and had general characteristics of an older woman,” she says in the clip above. “I wanted to eradicate that.” And she did. I think of Jessica as an older woman, but not an old woman. She not only managed to exist after her husband’s passing, she built a life that her beloved Frank wouldn’t recognize, and she doesn’t feel guilty for it. The consistent singlehood might pacify an audience that doesn’t want to deal with an older woman’s sexuality, but it also gives Jessica the freedom to go wherever she wants without answering to anyone. I still don’t think of Angela Lansbury as an old woman, despite her having lived over nine fabulous decades. She’s just too damn full of life. To judge by the article he wrote about her for Vanity Fair in 2012, Len Cariou agrees with me.

The show and the producers’ thoughts on it remind me that you can’t judge even a decade out of context. The 1980s weren’t as advanced or liberated as I would like, but they made Jessica Fletcher a cultural icon, and an earlier era might not have done that. I have to be grateful.

But just between you and me, Ms. Lansbury, I’m still a little disappointed that you didn’t have Jessica take Michael up on his offer to…go to Singapore. All that chemistry going to waste? I understand that you were happily married so you wouldn’t capitalize on it in real life, but your fictional alter ego should’ve gotten some of that.

I couldn’t find any clips of Jessica and Michael in Murder, She Wrote, but I thought you might enjoy this clip of the two of them re-enacting a scene from Sweeney Todd at a tribute to Stephen Sondheim. If you’re not familiar with the musical, yes, they are talking about what you think they’re talking about.

Kimberly also noticed a fair amount of sparks between Angela Lansbury and Leslie Nielsen, the one guy who got to first base with Cabot Cove’s most eligible widow. 

Tags: 1980s, Angela Lansbury, feminism, Jessica Fletcher, Len Cariou, Leslie Nielsen, Murder, She Wrote