The Unfettered Critic – February 2023

Ah, Masterpiece Theatre.

Since 1971, this British-produced television program has sustained us unlettered American slobs (no offense) with weekly servings of fascinating drama. Initially, Masterpiece Theatre aired adaptations of classic novels and historical biographies. Then one happy day they added compelling mysteries and police procedurals into the mix.

These newcomers proved so popular that in 1980 they were spun off into a sister series, eventually known as Masterpiece Mystery! And that’s the sister we want to remind ourselves of here.

Let’s start by looking back to the not-so-distant past:

Last fall, Masterpiece Mystery! upped its game by scheduling three different detective shows, airing back-to-back on Sunday evenings. Admittedly, we were  caught off-guard by the scheduling, and didn’t give you, dear readers, the “check it out” that we should have.

We just watched. (Mea culpa.)

(We-a culpa?)

But we will, rest assured, make it up to you shortly.

Leading that Sunday pack was Miss Scarlet and the Duke, a tale set in Victorian London about “the first female detective.” We’d already become acquainted with this show and loved it, and it primed us to stick around for premieres of the evening’s additional offerings.

Next up was Magpie Murders, an adaptation of a best-selling novel by British author Anthony Horowitz. Horowitz was tasked with reworking his novel so that most of the actors/characters could play dual roles in an intriguing “story-within-a-story.” He accomplished this by delegating the sleuthing to two fictional detectives, one in the present, and one in the past. The show’s contemporary story introduces Susan Ryeland, a diligent editor assigned to a whodunnit manuscript titled Magpie Murders. Susan discovers that the unpublished manuscript is missing its revelatory final chapter, and to complicate matters, the author died right after delivering his work. The second detective is the fictional hero of that manuscript, Atticus Pund, a Poirot-type detective who’s attempting to solve a very similar mystery.

Okay—we definitely were hooked.

We willingly stuck around for the third show, Annika, a modern tale about Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed, who’s tasked with running a “marine homicide unit” (think murders near major waterways) in Glasgow, Scotland, while at the same time singlehandedly raising a feisty teenaged daughter. The mysteries that Annika tackles each week aren’t earthshaking, but her personality draws you in. She regularly breaks the fourth wall to engage the viewing audience (us) with her droll thoughts and unique insights (often based on literary works).

These shows kept us enchanted for all six weeks of their seasonal run, so we had planned to let you know whether and when PBS would offer additional seasons. Except, dang it, we’d neglected to tell you about them in the first place.

So let’s get back to the present—and the future

If you didn’t catch any of these shows last autumn, we have a solution. Miss Scarlet returned to regular PBS broadcasting for its third season on January 8, 2023. If you missed the first few episodes—or want to binge the first and second seasons along with (or before) the third—you can find them all on PBS Passport, the streaming service you gained access to when you donated to local your Public Broadcasting Service. Which you did, right?

As for the other two, they’re also streaming on PBS Passport—and the network promises new seasons will arrive via their regular broadcast service…eventually. Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pund will return in an adaptation of a new Horowitz mystery: Moonflower Murders. And a new season of Annika will show up…one of these days.

So, we-a culpa. Better late than never. We bet you’ll love ‘em all.