Netflix review: ‘Murdoch Mysteries’

As I slog my way through my last two months of grad school classes, I’m not ashamed to admit that there are times when I cool my overheated brain in a nice bath of light reading or television. On the television side, though, I’ve given up entirely on the network stuff. For the first time since college, I’m watching none of the alphabet networks’ current offerings. Instead, I’ve been following a superior effort from Canada – Murdoch Mysteries, on Netflix streaming.

William Murdoch (Yannick Bisson) is a stalwart detective for the Toronto Constabulary in the 1890s. A frustrated scientist, he keeps up with the journals and frequently applies the latest discoveries to his forensic work (effectively this is “CSI—Victorian Toronto”). He even invents devices never before seen, such as night vision goggles and telefax machines – which are promptly forgotten about, apparently, once their job is done. Though brainy as Jeeves, he’s limited on the emotional side (we’d say he scores high on the autism spectrum). He’s strongly attracted to Dr. Julia Ogden (Héléne Joy), the beautiful medical examiner, but doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s a geek, but the Victorian kind, so he dresses neatly.

A nice touch is that he’s a practicing Catholic who attends mass daily and crosses himself whenever he encounters the dead.

He is supported by Chief Inspector Brackenreid (Thomas Craig), a Yorkshireman who likes to bluster about “good old-fashioned police work,” but knows Murdoch’s value and mostly supports him. Constable Crabtree (Jonny Harris) is callow but enthusiastic, and provides comic relief and a foil for Murdoch.

The scripts range from very good to television boilerplate. The writers delight in bringing in actual historical personages as guest characters. Nicola Tesla shows up more than once, as does Arthur Conan Doyle. I quite liked the guy who played Doyle, though he neglected to speak in Doyle’s Edinburgh burr. Buffalo Bill wasn’t bad, but they portrayed Annie Oakley as if she were Calamity Jane, a vile slander on a lady of quality. The guy who played Houdini looked nothing like the man, and was too tall.

Ah, well.

A particular pleasure of the series is its recreation of life in period Toronto. Location shooting is combined (increasingly as the series progresses) with CGI to create an extremely rich and authentic look. I like the costumes a lot (though my costumer friends will doubtless find numerous flaws in detail, but they look good to me. Dr. Ogden, though, sometimes tends to dress in a way that seems to me too casual for the times).

Off and on they fall into TV tropes – sinister government agents, sociopathic military officers, and I skipped the episode about homosexuals. I was disappointed in the series’ credulous attitude to the occult. But at its best, Murdoch Mysteries is an old-fashioned (in more than one sense) mystery series that provides a lot of entertainment and a pleasant excursion to the past.

It’s nice to watch a show where people dress properly.

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