Morse (and latterly Lewis), Jane Tennyson, Frost, Dalgleish, Lynley, to name just the more or less modern-day British detectives - my wife and I love them all, thanks to PBS' Masterpiece Theater over the years. But many of these folks have been written with serious personal problems of one sort of another. Midsomer is delightful both for its gently humorous picture of English village life and for the wise old philosopher king, DCI Tom Barnaby, played by John Nettles. His character brings considerable intelligence, patience and humor to the job of teaching a succession of junior officers how to avoid jumping to conclusions - and while he doesn't get to spend as much time as he'd like to with his lovely family, the show mostly avoids the dysfunctional-family issues that beset many policemen in most places.
We haven't seen half enough of Midsomer in the US (BBC America's Monday Night Mystery show is (sob!) long gone and Masterpiece doesn't completely specialize in mysteries though I see Poirot is back just now). I am therefore, now that I've invested in a Roku box, delighted to see that the show is still in production and that a huge number of episodes we haven't seen are online. We're taking the series in order at the moment so it might be a while before we see the current DCI Barnaby - I expect we'll go out of sequence at some point to meet him.
We looked up Midsomer just expecting to find and re-watch some old episodes, like "The Killings at Badger's Drift" which we watched last night. Finding such a wealth of stuff we haven't seen out there is wonderful! One does sort of wonder how Midsomer (like Morse's Oxford and Marple's St Mary Mead) retains any live people as some episodes lose characters at an Italian-renaissance-court pace.
Happy happy. 10 out of 10.
We haven't seen half enough of Midsomer in the US (BBC America's Monday Night Mystery show is (sob!) long gone and Masterpiece doesn't completely specialize in mysteries though I see Poirot is back just now). I am therefore, now that I've invested in a Roku box, delighted to see that the show is still in production and that a huge number of episodes we haven't seen are online. We're taking the series in order at the moment so it might be a while before we see the current DCI Barnaby - I expect we'll go out of sequence at some point to meet him.
We looked up Midsomer just expecting to find and re-watch some old episodes, like "The Killings at Badger's Drift" which we watched last night. Finding such a wealth of stuff we haven't seen out there is wonderful! One does sort of wonder how Midsomer (like Morse's Oxford and Marple's St Mary Mead) retains any live people as some episodes lose characters at an Italian-renaissance-court pace.
Happy happy. 10 out of 10.