YMMV / Murder, She Wrote

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Given just how often Jessica runs into murders, including a death rate in Cabot Cove that per capita rivals a warzone, many fans suggested, only half tongue-in-cheek, that Jessica was actually the most successful serial killer in Television history.
• Archive Panic: Going for a solid 12 seasons and about 265 episodes puts the show in this category, to say nothing of the four spinoff movies and the novel series, which hit fifty titles in 2019 and is still going at a rate of two new books a year.
• Award Snub: Angela Lansbury: Twelve years, twelve Emmy Award nominations, not a single win.
• Base-Breaking Character: Jessica's nephew Grady splits the fanbase. On the one hand, he has quite the hatedom who get tired of his endless schtick of constantly being dumped by his new girlfriends, never having a steady job, failing at life in general, and taking up time with unfunny comic relief. It feels like the writers kept wanting him to have his own show. That being said, there are those who feel he's a decently well-meaning Audience Surrogate who provides some welcome consistency amidst the mind-bogglingly large stream of one-time characters in Jessica's life and in spite of his flaws, he has been shown to care quite deeply about his Aunt.
• British Stuffiness: Most of the upper-class characters in the 'Emma episodes'.
• Crossover Ship: Nearly a canon example. The end of the Magnum, P.I. crossover, "Magnum on Ice", teased Jonathan Higgins and Jessica, although it never went past Higgins quite obviously crushing on Jessica, to her amusement. It was also added to at the end of the syndicated version of the first part, "Novel Connection".
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It's hard to find another contender for the ultimate crime or mystery series on Italian television. It premiered in 1988 and still enjoys full reruns to this day, on more than one channel in some periods. The series won a Telegatto (the Italian equivalent of an Emmy) in 1999, with Angela Lansbury meeting her Italian dubber Alina Moradei on stage.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Jessica playing the arcade game Spy Hunter in “Hit, Run, and Homicide” became this with Angela Lansbury’s final film appearance in Glass Onion as herself in a Zoom group chat playing Among Us. Looks like Jessica really stuck to those video games after all!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "It's a Dog's Life": Cherie Currie's character is named Echo. Guess what brand of power tools Currie endorses as a chainsaw artist?◊
  • In "It Runs In the Family", Emma McGill, also played by Lansbury, laughs off returning to singing because her voice has "more cracks than an old teapot."
  • Jessica's full name is Jessica Beatrice Fletcher. She's involved in murder mysteries. Guess who else is named Beatrice and involved in murder mysteries?
  • "The Corpse Flew First Class" had a thief hiding a stolen necklace in a can of shaving cream. Could this be the inspiration for Lewis Dodgson's idea for smuggling the embryos?
  • The episode "Murder at the Electric Cathedral" has Frank Bonner as a special guest star. The previous episode has a murderer named Frank Kelso and a victim named Ed Bonner.
  • In "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes", Jessica is accosted by a couple of would-be muggers and threatens to call the police. One of the muggers sarcastically asks if she's carrying the phone around in her purse. Carrying phones around on one's person was something that would become much more common in the years following the episode's airing. ^note  While handheld phones did exist at the time of airing, they were still in their first generation and far from the sort of device that one would just carry around in one's purse.
  • In the episode "A Killing in Vegas," the hotel owner Wes McSorley refers to Jerry Pappas, the casino manager, as "the king of the one-armed bandits". Pappas is played by Andreas Katsulas who, aside from his appearances on Babylon 5 and Star Trek, is famous for being the One-Armed killer in The Fugitive.
• Memetic Mutation: Jessica Fletcher is actually responsible for all the murders to happen on the show.
  • Jessica eating popcorn (from “Witness for the Defense") is a popular reaction GIF, mainly used in response to juicy gossip and the like.
  • Due to the Completely Different Title in Italian (see the Trivia page for more details) and the popularity gained by weird literature in Italy from The New '10s on, younger viewers joke about Jessica (the titular Lady in Yellow) being a supernatural entity even more powerful than The King in Yellow, which could also explain her Doom Magnet tendencies.
• Memetic Psychopath: Jessica is often portrayed in parodies as a serial killer going around murdering people or hires killers herself just to solve a mystery or write a book.
• Narm: The infamous drive-by swording sequence from The Celtic Riddle.
• Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: Many guest stars turned out to be allies of Jessica's or a Red Herring, while a character played by a much less famous person was the actual killer. A guest star has just as good a chance at being the Victim of the Week. In "Murder Digs Deep," the shifty Jerkass financing the episode's dig is played Robert Vaughn. He isn't the killer. It's his seemingly sweet wife, played by Connie Stevens. In "A Very Good Year for Murder", the family patriarch played by Eli Wallach was the murderer. Played with in the episode guest starring Dick Sargent: in the final minutes of the episode Jessica began questioning his character in the way that she often does when about to reveal that she has already figured out that they are the killer only for her to stop, apologize, admit that she had wrongly deduced that he was the killer but that she had just realized who the real killer was.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The episode "Murder, Plain and Simple" does a good job of utilizing Nothing Is Scarier when Jessica finds the body of the Victim of the Week, despite the scene taking place in broad daylight. Jessica is walking through a field early in the morning when she notices something strange about a nearby scarecrow in the distance, and gets closer when she realizes it's actually a dead body. There's no dialogue, and the use of Jessica completely alone while the background music heightens the sense of something being off makes the sequence totally unsettling.
  • Ellen's near-rape scene in "Tainted Lady." She's alone in a cell with a man who tried to coerce her into sex earlier in her life (he was in his thirties; she wasn't even eighteen at the time). He sits down next to her, squeezes her knee and makes veiled overtures to her with the promise of dropping charges if she complies. Though Ellen refuses and tries to behave bravely, she's clearly terrified of what's likely to happen. After failing to convince her, Sheriff Hays starts unbuckling his belt. Luckily, his deputy Mary Jo bursts in with breaking news about the case, keeping him away from Ellen, and he later gets fired offscreen.
  • "Love's Deadly Desire": Sibella's near-drowning. She goes out to the boathouse and the floorboards give out, dumping her in the water and getting her ankle caught. As the tide comes in, making the water deeper and deeper, she desperately screams for help, but the nearest people are some distance away, partying, oblivious to what's happening. You'd be forgiven for thinking she's going to be the Victim of the Week. Victims are often pretty unpleasant people (though Sibella has claws, she's also Jessica's friend and fairly charming), and death, when it happens, tends to come pretty quickly, rather than giving the victim time to panic. It's scarier than usual...though it gets less scary after Jessica figures out that Sibella is the killer and she set up the whole thing.
• Older Than They Think: The 1959 film version of The Bat shares many elements with Murder, She Wrote, such as a mystery writer going to a small town while writing her next novel and getting wrapped up in a real murder mystery.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Jessica's English cousin Emma cannot seem to decide whether she is a Londoner or a Yorkshirewoman.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Kathryn Morris was in one of the TV movies three years before Cold Case premiered.
  • George Clooney and Julianna Margulies both appeared in episodes (separately) eons before ER made them famous.
  • A young Courteney Cox played Jessica's husband Frank's great-niece, whose wedding sparks the plot of the two-parter "Death Stalks the Big Top."
  • Joaquin Phoenix and younger sister Summer played Jessica's grandnephew and grandniece in the Season 1 episode "We're Off to Kill The Wizard" when they were respectively 10 and 6. Being unknown child actors neither appear in the "Special Guest Stars" credits at the start of the episode.
  • Bryan Cranston plays a tennis player named Brian East, who is the Victim of the Week in Season 2's "Menace Anyone". A decade later, he would return to the show as another one-off character for the Season 12 episode "Something Foul in Flappieville". By this point he was a far more established actor in television and film, but this was still before his star-making role in Malcolm in the Middle.
  • A young Andy García is the mugger in the first episode "The Murder of Sherlock Holmes".
  • A pre-TNG John de Lancie appears in the season 2 episode "If The Frame Fits". Kate Mulgrew presaged her own Trek tenure by appearing in "The Corpse Flew First Class".
  • Megan Mullally is a young lawyer and former student of Jessica's accused of murder in the Season 5 episode "Coal Miner's Slaughter".
• She Really Can Act: Lois Chiles, considered by critics to be a rather flat presence in films like Moonraker and Death on the Nile, improves considerably in "The Return of Preston Giles" - so much so that when she fatally shoots Giles at the episode's end, she's almost chilling.
• The Scrappy:
  • Dorian in "Night of the Headless Horseman". He brings Jessica over so she can pose as his mother and does several stupid things no human being should ever do in his position under any circumstance - like trying to score a relationship with his crush, Sarah, who happens to be the daughter of a snobbish, stuck up man only concerned with "pedigree" and being high class. Oh, and he's Dorian's boss. Dorian is also an extremely unlikable caricature of the typical, orphaned loser nerd that can't speak his mind and attends a prestigious school. To be fair though, the writers at least seemed to know this, since at the episode's end Dorian doesn't end up with Sarah.
  • No one in this galaxy likes Marty from "Showdown in Saskatchewan." When you cheat on your wife (with whom you have a son), lie to your girlfriend about having a wife and kid, and name your son Buster, well... Marty should consider himself lucky that his girlfriend didn't tell his wife what he was up to.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Plenty of fans wish that Cabot Cove Deputy Marigold Feeny (who comes across a bit gung ho and unprepared but turns out to be a decent Action Girl) had been in more than one episode.
  • Considering the hatedom Grady gets compared to some of Jessica's lesser appearing relatives (like Carol Bannister Vicky and Howard and Howard Griffin and Nita Cochran), the producers might have missed a trick giving some of his episodes to them.
  • Of the "Wasted in a single episode" characters, Ellsworth Buffum from "Joshua Peabody Died Here, Possibly" might stand out. He gets a nice introduction as a historical society member who has a slightly comedic interaction with Amos, and then a Big Damn Heroes moment getting an injunction to stop a bulldozing, only to completely vanish for the rest of the episode, not being treated as a suspect, or being apparently involved in the further developments of the construction/burial site when he would have had reason to be interested in them.
  • Dennis Stanton is a complicated example. He got plenty of episodes of his own, when Angela Lansbury was taking a break from the show, but there are those who regret the limited number of episodes he got to share with Jessica.
  • Jessica's unofficial fan club from "Who Killed J.B. Fletcher" only made one appearance, but they would've made interesting foils to Eve Simpson and the gals of Loretta's Beauty Parlor due to both parties being involved in at least one murder.
  • Quite a few fans, including Pushing Up Roses, felt that David Tolliver, Jessica's young assistant and insistent admirer from the episode "Lovers and Other Killers", should've been in more than one episode, especially considering the ambiguity of said episode's ending regarding wether or not he was actually a killer.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A running gag in season 2 is the debate about whether local revolutionary war legend Joshua Peabody even existed, while by season 11 it's been proven off-screen that he has. It could have been interesting if the show had incorporated uncovering the proof of his existence into one of the episodes in between rather than just springing it so suddenly.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Due to recurring Values Dissonance elements of the show some of the designated Asshole Victims come across as this, but none more so than Lila from the episode "Lovers and Other Killers". Her only real crimes are cheating on and later breaking up with her abusive ex who she was quite honest with when she openly stated in no uncertain terms that their relationship was over, and for making fun of the killer Amelia who had not only been stalking her but had even tried to run her off the road! Suffice to say that’s something most people would be mad about. Yet for whatever reason her ex husband is given a free pass because he didn’t mean it when he threatened to kill her because clearly that makes it okay and Amelia is treated as a Sympathetic Murderer because she killed out of unrequited love!…
  • A more comedic example happens with Sybil Reed in "The Sins of Castle Cove." She's portrayed as in the wrong for writing her book to get revenge on the people whom she blames for making her life miserable when she was a teenager. However, given the fact that Cabot Cove is known as "The Murder Capital of Maine" for a reason, viewers found it ironic that Sybil was getting blasted for writing a book that portrayed her hometown as a Wretched Hive of murder and violence as if she made it all up.
• Values Dissonance: Given that this was made in the 1980s and 1990s, some elements that may have been considered Fair for Its Day may come across as insensitive and tone-deaf today, notably "Indian Giver." (Starting with the title, for one thing.) An Algonquin Native American (played by a Sri Lankan actor)^note seriously, they couldn't have cast a Native actor? Native people participated in film and TV, writing and directing as well as acting, from the earliest days of Hollywood dresses in a war bonnet and paint^note War bonnets are Plains Indian, not Algonquian, and are not worn in battle; they're for sacred ceremonies, like the Pope's mitre and rides into town to lay claim to Cabot Cove under the terms of an old treaty. (Having him reveal he's also a Harvard Law School graduate is a kinder and truer type: many Native men and women have studied law in order to work for land restoration.) He's referred to as "the Indian" even after his name, George Longbow, is known. Turns out his land grant is real but he's a fraud; he's Algonquian, but not really a descendant of the old chiefs, and he just wants to levy tribute from Cabot Cove residents so he can start an education fund for "deserving" Native youth. When the townspeople find out that's what he's up to, they decide to start such a fund anyway. Well gee, that's mighty white of you, ma'am.
• The Woobie:
  • Kimberly, the granddaughter of the wealthy Henry in "Test of Wills." She's the only one who is truly upset when her grandfather is murdered, because she's arguably the only member of the family who really loves him, and then her fiancé is also murdered. Her fiancé is exposed post-mortem as having been blackmailing her aunt, and meanwhile, her grandfather turns out to have faked his own murder just to see how the family would react. Not to mention the cruel words her grandfather had to share in his fake will alongside having to deal with a domineering bitch of a mother who doesn't give a shit about what she wants and is using her to get the grandfather's money. It's hard to blame her for the way she ends the episode. She essentially becomes a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds when it turns out she accidentally shot her fiancé when she was trying to kill herself and tried to pin the blame on her grandfather and later her aunt. When she comes forward to Jessica with the truth she breaks down in tears over what happened, and is prepared to face whatever consequences there might be when she goes with Jessica to the police. At the very least, she's officially turned her back on her family and might have a chance for real happiness now that she's out of such a toxic home life.
  • Donna in "Just Another Fish Story;" she's a very shy, easily hurt young lady who gets caught up in a murder investigation against her will. She's scared of disappointing everyone. She's the killer in the episode, only it had been in self-defense. It gets worse in "Something Borrowed, Someone Blue" when we see how stressful her home life has been. Later episodes do give her a happy ending, with her being happily married to Grady.
  • George in "Shear Madness", a quiet, sweet man who goes through most of the episode with the accusation of murdering his sister's fiancés over his head. After the first one's death, he spent years of his life in a mental hospital and just after being released, a second gets murdered the same way, panicking him with the thought that he'll get locked up for life. It's made worse by the fact that he only killed the first fiancé accidentally in self-defense when the fiancé tried to stab him for knowing too much, and blanked everything out from the trauma.

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