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Post by inuvik on Apr 22, 2008 15:24:41 GMT -5
Not exactly "Fall Season", but a midseason show--close enough. I just had to rave about my new favourite show, Murdoch Mysteries. It started 3 weeks ago and is fantastic! It's a good old fashioned murder mystery series. It has about a minute long opening, which--gasp!--opens the show (what a concept). It is set in Toronto in about the late 1800's--electricity and phones, but also horse and buggy. It stars Yannick Bisson, who used to be on Sue Thomas F.B.Eye (I know some of you know that show). It is so nice to have a proper, dramatic mystery series that isn't a comedy (like Monk, now my second fave show) or primarily about forensics (like CSI). www.citytv.com/micro/murdochmysteries/
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Post by inuvik on Apr 22, 2008 15:26:28 GMT -5
I just had to rave about my new favourite show, Murdoch Mysteries. It started 3 weeks ago and is fantastic! It's a good old fashioned murder mystery series. It has about a minute long opening, which--gasp!--opens the show (what a concept). It is set in Toronto in about the late 1800's--electricity and phones, but also horse and buggy. It stars Yannick Bisson, who used to be on Sue Thomas F.B.Eye (I know some of you know that show). It is so nice to have a proper, dramatic mystery series that isn't a comedy (like Monk, now my second fave show) or primarily about forensics (like CSI). www.citytv.com/micro/murdochmysteries/Apparently Murdoch is on the bubble... best Canadian show in years (and that is saying a lot!)....but I did what I could, going to the network and using their comment box to praise it to the skies. Fingers crossed--they made 13 episodes (and we know what that means for a show! ) and have shown 8, so there is still time!
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Post by inuvik on Apr 22, 2008 15:27:46 GMT -5
Deserves its own thread now--my day has been made! ;D ;D ;D ;D From a media release:
Shaftesbury Films is thrilled to announce its one-hour drama series Murdoch Mysteries has been renewed for a second season by Citytv. Starring Yannick Bisson as Detective William Murdoch, this Victorian era crime investigation series increased its audience by 70 per cent* throughout the first season; a testament to its growing popularity with viewers.
“The audience for the first season of Murdoch Mysteries just kept growing week by week. It is hugely gratifying to reach such a large audience for Citytv,” said Christina Jennings, Chairman and CEO, Shaftesbury Films. “The success in Canada has been mirrored both in the UK and internationally through the sales efforts of Granada International. We are delighted to have the series renewed by Citytv and the rest of our partners.” Based on Maureen Jennings’s critically acclaimed Detective Murdoch Mystery novels, Murdoch Mysteries is set in 1895 Toronto, and explores the intriguing world of William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson), a handsome young detective using radical forensic techniques to solve some of the city’s most gruesome murders. Murdoch’s small circle of confidantes includes pathologist Julia Ogden (Hélène Joy), a staunch ally who shares the detective’s fascination with forensic science, and Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris), Murdoch’s eager but inexperienced right-hand man. Though his unconventional approach elicits skepticism from his boss, Inspector Brackenreid (Thomas Craig), Murdoch is often the only one who can crack the case.
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Post by hoosier on Apr 22, 2008 18:21:09 GMT -5
Congrats, Inuvik!
I wonder if it will ever find a market here because it does sound good. I remember a show that was on a few years ago that seems similar. It starred Tom Berenger and was set in the Old West.
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Post by inuvik on Mar 4, 2009 12:13:44 GMT -5
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Post by inuvik on Jun 15, 2009 15:48:18 GMT -5
Congrats, Inuvik! I wonder if it will ever find a market here because it does sound good. I remember a show that was on a few years ago that seems similar. It starred Tom Berenger and was set in the Old West. Season 1 comes out on DVD on Tuesday.
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Post by inuvik on Jun 18, 2009 11:46:13 GMT -5
American public television is to start showing Murdoch later this month! I really really encourage everyone to try it. Televising Toronto the Good
The Victorian Era, when the city gained its nickname Toronto the Good, is usually thought of as a time of staid social order upheld by unwritten laws of morality. In the name of propriety, boarding houses had a strict ten o'clock curfew. And keeping up public appearances was paramount. There was, however, another side of the city beneath this prim and proper surface, as journalist C.S. Clark describes in Of Toronto the Good (1898)—which despite its name is actually an excursion into the bars, brothels, and gambling dens to uncover the city's underbelly of vice.
Murdoch Mysteries, the Shaftesbury Films–produced television show that follows the exploits of William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson)—the Victorian detective first encountered in the best-selling novels of Maureen Jennings—helps bring this other side of Toronto's history to life. Currently riding a wave of success, the multiple Gemini-nominated show just got renewed for a third season on Citytv and will begin being aired on American Public Television at the end of the month. Season one was released on DVD earlier this week. The main characters on Murdoch Mysteries. Murdoch Mysteries works both as a straight-ahead detective procedural as well as an illuminating take on mid-1890s Toronto. On the one hand, the straight-laced Detective Murdoch employs all the latest scientific and forensic techniques, including fingerprinting and ballistics, and blood-testing to solve each week's murder. Some critics have dubbed the show CSI: 1895. Other critics have suggested that some of the mysteries wrap up a little too conveniently, but that's really no different from any of the other television procedurals that must go through the requisite twists and turns before the final credits roll.
The show's real strength is in the main characters: Detective Murdoch and the city of Toronto. Murdoch is an emotionally stilted bookworm, a methodical thinker who devises his own contraptions—like building his own lie-detector device—and scientific methods based on what he scours from journals. But his character is complicated at moments, paced over the course of season one, when the strength of his convictions is challenged—most notably when the mysticism of a séance shakes his certainty about the infallibility of science, and when his single-minded antipathy towards his estranged father forces Murdoch to confront his own biases during an investigation.
Toronto is more than just a character because its cobblestone and dirt streetscape provides the setting—and incidentally the show is filmed on soundstages and in Cambridge. The show captures the historical character of the city: its fashions, its social codes, and its corridors of power. It's also a deeply Protestant city that places severe limits on the advancement of Catholics, as Murdoch—who crosses himself every time he sees a dead body—encounters when he's refused a promotion solely because of his religion. My note here--some of us joke about the drinking game--every time he crosses himself, you take a swig. Murdoch's investigations take him across the city's class spectrum, from "ratting"—betting on which terrier can kill more rats—in dingy taverns to fundraisers for Barnardo-like charities in upper-class drawing rooms. Another episode wades through the cutthroat debates and back-stabbing politics surrounding public utilities and power in the city.
While Murdoch is a progressive in scientific method, he is also a man of his time. Rarely does Murdoch Mysteries fall into the all-too-easy trap seen in historical dramas of giving a smug nod and a wink to the present by making a statement about how far we've come. The era's social attitudes are, for the most part, presented matter-of-factly. When a groom's murder on the morning of his wedding leads Murdoch into the city's homosexual subculture—a group that meets under the subterfuge of being a tennis club—the detective isn't at all antagonistic, but he isn't an anachronistic champion of rights either. It'd be unbelievable. Rather, the unease he displays promises to repeat over the course of the series when Murdoch is forced to reexamine his steadfast beliefs. Likewise, in deference to the social protocol of the day, Murdoch's romantic pinings for Dr. Julia Ogden—the pathologist played by Hélène Joy—remain largely limited to stiff sideward glances and awkward, unfinished conversations throughout season one.
Rather than framing the Victorian era as entirely dark or oppressive—as in David Lean's Dickens adaptations—Murdoch Mysteries has a sense of humour, provided by Constable George Crabtree, Murdoch's assistant. The constraints of Victorian social mores are humorously examined when Crabtree makes a social visit upon a lady or when he has to baby-sit a wild, ne'er-do-well prince visiting Toronto while Murdoch investigates Fenian rebels conspiring the prince's abduction.
While Murdoch Mysteries gives a good representation of Victorian Toronto, it doesn't overwhelm by enumerating an abundance of quaint but unenlightening historical detail intended only to emphasize historical verisimilitude. When such subtle details do arise, like when one character eating an orange casually mentions how difficult it is to acquire one, they serve the story or as scene-setting.
Sure, there are probably anachronisms if you want to find them, and the rotating case of visitors, from Nicola Tesla to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, stopping by to help the detective solve crimes is a bit far-fetched. But a lighter tone for the Victorian era—while still illuminating the era's darker shades—is a refreshing change from an overly noir or stuffy costume drama.
The four-disc DVD set, released yesterday, includes commentary on the first episode, and brief interviews with all the key players—including Jennings—on disc four along with textual background information.
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