Relax! Murder, She Wrote will always be there for us

 In my capacity as a TV reviewer, I should probably be writing about season three of The Bear, or telling you about some amazing, obscure new A24 show that you can only watch if you rig your wi-fi router with a paper clip and a bit of tinfoil.  I’m sorry though, I can’t – I’m too busy watching back-to-back Murder, She Wrote on Great! TV. Yes, I’m now eschewing modern life and all its very demure, very cutesy bollocks, and living in the very early ’90s, where Jessica Fletcher is still using a word processor and there’s a convoluted plot line involving a video store and a stolen diamond necklace.

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Am I alone? Well, it certainly feels like that, but now we all exist in our own separate TV bubbles, out of context and out of time. You’re probably in one right now. Maybe your interior world is wall-to-wall Bridgerton. Or you live in Motherland, or you’re regularly consuming ancient episodes of Outnumbered. We’re all choosing our own adventure, whether it’s obscure Japanese endurance games or dusty old quotes from The Inbetweeners. I swear, if the four-minute warning ever sounds, loads of people will probably be spending their final moments on Earth watching that episode of Friends with the beef trifle. 

This makes me feel a bit panicky, to be honest. It’s like a weird variety of FOMO, except everyone is missing out. I genuinely believe that watching TV should be a shared pursuit on a big scale, not a potentially shameful solo enterprise that you can’t really share with anyone. Who will care that you’re just reaching the juicy conclusion of White Lotus season two, years after everyone else? How do you tell people that you’ve just discovered Derry Girls when the cultural moment is so long gone that the Derry Girls are now 37 and working in HR? 

Maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of there just being too much content to take in, too much choice and too many distracting side roads to get lost down. 

• Fool Me Once is unfocused but fun – and left me with my gob open, trying to keep up
• Alan Titchmarsh makes the Calm app look like a house party thrown by Super Hans

So, I guess the antidote is that we all watch something together, no matter what it is, and try to have as much fun as possible. I went to the Edinburgh Festival last week to a show called Solve Along A Murder She Wrote, and was reminded of the positive power of watching something really cheesy with a group of people who’d had too much cheap white wine. 

We waved at Jessica Fletcher as she waved at us in the credits. We waved little signs when we suspected someone, we laughed at the terrible special effects and terrible acting, and marvelled at the fact that Jessica always has an epiphany 18 minutes before the end of the show. It didn’t matter that everyone in the cast is now either ancient or dead. It didn’t even matter if you’d never seen the show at all. It was joyful and silly, as watching TV with your friends and family should be. The very opposite of that lonely feeling you get when you wonder if you’re the only person in the world watching A Touch of Frost on ITVX. (The answer to that, of course, is yes, you are.)

Still, the good news is that when you turn on regular Freeview council telly, Murder, She Wrote will always be there, sponsored by Willowbrook reclining chairs. It’s such a stalwart of the schedules that it may as well be wired directly into our homes along with the fibre broadband. 

So, please join me in a high-backed recliner as we all settle down in the day room and enjoy a good murder as nature intended. Bonus points if you spot the moment Jessica realises that the person who stole the diamond necklace was the video store manager’s wife! Now that’s what I call Great! TV. 

Lucy Sweet is a freelance journalist.

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