Acting for Two: Angela Lansbury played both main character Jessica Fletcher and her cousin Emma McGill in the episode "Sing a Song of Murder". She later reprised the role of Emma for "It Runs in the Family" though without Jessica. Lansbury also plays her Antebellum South era ancestor, Sarah McCollough, in the TV Movie The Last Free Man.
Actor-Shared Background: In the episode "Three Strikes, You're Out", Lt. Caceras mentions that he played a stint in the minor leagues in baseball. Reni Santoni, who played Caceras, played professional baseball briefly before going into acting.
The exterior shots of Cabot Cove were filmed in the town of Mendocino (about halfway between San Francisco and the Oregon border).
"Witness for the Defense" is supposedly set in Quebec, but all visible text in the episode is in English, despite the fact that by the mid-80s Quebec's strict French language laws had come into force and all public signage and documents would have been in French. In addition, some interior scenes are shown to have green-lettered exit signs (the norm in California). Virtually all Canadian exit signs in that style are red and in Quebec would have the French word "Sortie" written instead of the English "Exit".
"Murder to a Jazz Beat", supposedly set in New Orleans, is a particularly egregious example. Palm trees can be seen in almost all exterior shots, and one street scene has a prominent view of one of LA's landmarks - the Captial Records Tower - in the background.
In Italian it became La signora in giallo ("The Lady in Yellow"), since "giallo" means both yellow and, more broadly than in English, mystery fiction in general, thanks to the publishing house Mondadori making the genre popular in Italy through its yellow covers.
In Germany it's known as Mord is ihr Hobby - "Murder is Her Hobby".
Defictionalization: An official series of Murder, She Wrote novels claiming to be written by Jessica Fletcher "with Donald Bain" started in 1989 and continues to this day. They're done in the style of the episodes, though, rather than being based on the novels she's written in-series.
Angela Lansbury is British and Irish, while Jessica Fletcher is an American (albeit of Irish descent).
Recurring character Dennis Stanton was never said to be British, but had a rather elegant British accent - Keith Michell was Australian.
The character Michael Hagarty is an Irishman who worked with the British MI-6. His actor, Len Cariou, is Canadian.
Mark Lindsey Chapman did this at least twice: while he used his natural British accent in "A Death in the Family", he was a fake Irishman in "The Wind Around the Tower" and a fake Frenchman in "The Grand Old Lady".
The very American Anthony Geary as a Russian cop in "From Russia, With Blood" (with a surprisingly convincing accent).
In "It Runs In the Family" the British sister of Emma's old viscount lover is played by Rosemary Murphy, an American born in Germany.
In later seasons, Grady is Happily Married to his longtime sweetheart Donna. Grady and Donna are played by Michael Horton and Debbie Zipp, who are also married in Real Life and have been since before the show began.
One of the principal directors on the series was Anthony Shaw, one of Angela Lansbury's real-life sons. Angela's nephew, David Lansbury, and niece, Felicia Lansbury, have each guest-starred a couple of times on the series. After she had taken control of the production in 1991, Angela hired her brother, veteran TV producer Bruce Lansbury, as Supervising Producer, and also installed her husband and agent, Peter Shaw, as Executive In Charge of Production.
In one episode Sheriff Metzger gets a new deputy called Olsen who says he reminds her of her father, which makes sense as she's played by Ron Masak's daughter Kathryn Masak.
Ron Masak, before joining the cast as Sheriff Mort Metzger, appeared in two earlier episodes (the first playing a cop in New York!).
William Windom played one of the guilty party in the season 1 finale "Funeral at Fifty-Mile" before appearing as Dr. Seth Hazlitt in the second season.
Screwed by the Network: Happened during the 12th and final season. The show had spent most of its run on Sunday nights and had gotten excellent ratings in the process. However, after Leslie Moonves became president of CBS Entertainment in 1995 before the 12th season began, he moved it to Thursday nights opposite Friends - a show that, ironically, he had previously helped to produce back when he was president of Warner Bros. Television. Many longtime fans of Murder, She Wrote angrily protested the scheduling change, and openly suspected Moonves of deliberately making the move in order to kill the show and, therefore, make room for new programs which he had greenlit. Needless to say, the move to Thursday was a disaster for the show as the ratings dropped from the top 10 all the way to 58 and led to the show ending its run.
Technology Marches On: During the run of the show, Jessica goes from typing manuscripts on a typewriter to using a computer, as reflected in updated opening credits. The final movie shows that Jessica has even begun using a laptop.
The pilot episode, "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes". When Jessica encounters the two young thugs in the alley, she threatens to call the police, but one of the thugs points out that it would be impossible for her to do so because she couldn't possibly have a phone in her purse.
The episode "Murder, She Spoke" has a series of audio mystery books for the blind, and Jessica is recording the last of them because the Asshole Victim doesn't think it's profitable. Even the main proponent of the audiobooks agrees with this assessment. This, of course, was before audio books became more common and the internet had sites like Audible, which boast hundreds of thousands of audio books to stream... some of which include the "official" J.B. Fletcher novels to boot!
Uncredited Role: Dale Robertson appeared in back-to-back episodes ("The Last Flight of the Dixie Damsel" and "Prediction: Murder") as Col. Lee Goddard, an army buddy of Jessica's late husband. For reasons that he didn't elucidate, Robertson objected to the alphabetical order format of the show's credits and said that he'd prefer not to be credited at all, and the producers obliged. Thus he gets no credit, despite being the most prominent guest star in both episodes.
Richard Levison and William Link originally conceived the series as a starring vehicle for Jean Stapleton of All in the Family fame. When she turned the project down, they sent the pilot script to Angela Lansbury because of her work in two previous film adaptations of Agatha Christie novels.note 1978's Death on the Nile and 1980's The Mirror Crack'd Luckily, Lansbury saw great potential in the Jessica Fletcher character, and the rest is history. Stapleton admittedly did not regret turning down the role and later recounted in an interview of getting a heartfelt "Thank you Jean!" from Lansbury at an awards show.
Levinson & Link would have continued to helm the series on their own if not for Levinson's death during the first season. Link opted to leave the series production as a result, only writing a few scripts.
You Look Familiar: Given the show's incredible length and need for frequent one-off character parts, many actors that were active in television would do multiple appearances on this program as completely different characters. Several series regulars got their start as corpses, innocents, and killers:
Before John Astin began a three-episode run as recurring shady real estate agent Harry Pierce in Season 2, he played a film director in Season 1's "Hooray for Homicide" and returned much later in Season 11's "Flim Flam" once again playing a completely new character, Fritz Randall.
Madlyn Rhue, before playing Cabot Cove's librarian in later seasons, appeared earlier as a victim's widow in "Seal of the Confessional".
Herb Edelman appeared on the show three times as different characters and at least once as a police lieutenant before eventually morphing into the semi-recurring character of Lieutenant Artie Gelbert after Jessica moved to New York.
Another interesting example is "Murder on Madison Avenue": Firstly, after having played Jonathan Quayle Higgins in the aforementioned Crossover with Magnum, P.I., John Hillerman appears in this episode as a completely different character, to the likely confusion of longtime viewers. Secondly, Barbara Babcock's character (her fourth on MSW, fifth if you count The Law and Harry McGraw) is murdered by her assistant (played by Hallie Foote); but in an interesting possible Casting Gag, the next season episode "For Whom the Ball Tolls" sees Babcock and Foote together again (playing completely different characters, of course), working together on a historic preservation committee, as if nothing had ever happened.
Leslie Nielsen is another special case in that he appears in the first season as the captain of a cruise ship when Jessica gets involved with a murder aboard the ship. The episode ends indicating they'll have a dinner date. He turns up again in season three as an old admirer of Jessica's who spots her on the street, plants a huge kiss on her lips, then shortly after gets accused of murder.
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