Must Be Dead By Now Bingo

(February 08, 2002)

While laying in bed, whining grumpily and trying to come up with a better story for how I hurt my back, I watched TV. What's on TV in the middle of the day? All the shows I didn't watch during the eighties while I was too busy stone washing stuff and cutting up perfectly good T shirts. LA LAW. And Magnum PI. And Murder She Wrote.

It's very important, I learned, to see Murder She Wrote from the beginning. If you miss the beginning, you miss either the murder, or else you see the murder but you miss the motive set-up. It's not like Columbo, which takes the approach of showing the viewer the killer, his or her motive, and the cover-up all before we ever see Peter Falk at all. A unique but rather anemic mystery-telling technique, since it omits the actual mystery. In fact, for you mystery-lovers out there, I recommend MISSING the beginning of Columbo, so you can solve the crime along with your favorite trenchcoated hangdog detective.

On Murder She Wrote we the viewers do get to solve the crime along with Jessica Fletcher, but you HAVE to see the beginning. Otherwise, in the final scene as Jessica flips on the lights to surprise the killer, who is always either planting or removing some piece of evidence, her flashback explanation is a surprise to you. She's all "Jill, at the antique shop you told me you read about the missing cufflink in the newspaper, but the police deliberately left that detail out..." and I'm all "CUFFLINK! What cufflink!" It's just no good.

But there's another compelling reason to see the beginning, and that is because of the OPENING CREDITS. The thing about Murder She Wrote is, it's the Fantasy Island of detective stories. You have never seen so many guest "stars" running around on one show. And if you're the kind of person that remembers faces but not names, you'll sound like an idiot if you try to tell the plot of the episode to another non-lobotomized human. "Laura from General Hospital is married to Gomez Addams, see, but she has this secret past, and Bobby from Taxi is this waiter, see..." It's really just no good.

If I DO see the credits, I'll definitely recognize the names Genie Francis, John Astin, and Jeff Conaway. Then all I have to do is match 'em up when I see their faces, as the story unfolds. If I miss the credits, I don't stand a chance. For the whole episode I go crazy trying to think of "Bert Convy."

But sometimes it doesn't even matter. There's a whole set of guys that were left over from the square-headed seventies that seemed to breed and fester on these shows, and I cannot tell them apart.

Can you? Let's see. Let's play a round of MUST BE DEAD BY NOW BINGO.

Match the six B-level, leftover seventies interchangable names to the faces.

A) Peter Graves
B) Robert Goulet
C) Martin Landau
D) Patrick McGoohan
E) Lyle Waggoner
F) Robert Vaughn

1. 2.
3. 4.
5. 6.