TONIGHT on Murder, She Wrote

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, we're putting on a show! And it's all very Judy Garland-coded. 

Mystery novelist and always there at the wrong time Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) is summoned to Boston by her nephew Grady (Michael Horton), who's part of the team bringing up-and-coming talent Patti Bristol (Lorna Luft), and her mother, legend Rita (Vivian Blaine), in their joint-starring production in rehearsals before it heads to the Great White Way. 

When Patti and her brother Barry (Gregg Henry) are caught off guard in a mugging incident that lands Patti in critical condition and the would-be mugger dead, Jessica isn't convinced there's not more to it. But who's behind it?

Could it be the fabulous matriarch never out of makeup? The brother, who was never the talented favorite? Milton Berle; what is he doing here?! Round it out with an opportunistic understudy (Elaine Giftos), a total dick of a director (Robert Morse), a producer (Patrick O'Neal) who really needs a hit, and Grady's girlfriend of the month (Sharee Gregory). It's anyone's guess. 

Fortunately, while our cranky idiosyncratic detective (Gregory Sierra) of the week is on an all-veg diet, Jessica is on the case while wolfing down street empanadas.  Between scenes of three-card monte and street preachers, we even see two and a half musical numbers! And stick around for a performance from Angela Lansbury in the final act that rivals her manipulative mother role in The Manchurian Candidate; we couldn't be more in love or terrified. 

Turn on the coffee pot, grab your old bottle of scotch and barbituates, and please do try to stay on pitch because it's going to be a doozy of a BROADWAY MALADY. 

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, we're heading to the illustrious and captivating setting of... Congress?! 

Somehow, some way, JB Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) finds herself as a temporary statesperson for Maine. And no one shall be seated during the thrilling discussion of bureaucratic protocol... but there's also a murder to solve. 

When the eyewitness to an unseemly cover-up involving DC politicians winds up beaten and dead, the suspects are all wearing suits. It might be legislators Mitchell Ryan, Nicholas Pryor, or Stephan Mach, or maybe it's Jessica's spunky secretary (Linda Kelsey) or lobbyist Mark Shera... Get your votes in and choose your driving gloves wisely. (Black suit, brown gloves? Ick!)

Find out with us, thanks to the editorial and fabulous eye of socialite columnist with a cat Edie Adams and this week's kinda useless detective, Herschel Bernardi, all in the heart of the District of Columbia. Taxation without representation has never been so salacious. 

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, we head to a Lake Tahoe casino to witness the flabbergasting powers of The Great Calamari... the Great Castellaneta... the Great Caligari... (what?) oh, The Great Cagliostro! This master of hypnosis is our victim for DEATH CASTS A SPELL.

In front of hypnotized witnesses, the Great Cag-- uh, the hypnotist (José Ferrer) in question is found dead in his hotel room after a demonstration for members of the press.  A shattered pane of glass makes one think it could've been a murderer via the balcony.  Professional busybody and mystery writer Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) is stumped, but she has her assistant editor Joan (Diana Canova) to bounce ideas off of.

So, who did it?  There are only so many options! One of the hypnotized? The beautiful casino owner's wife (Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas!) or her hot-tempered husband (Robert Loggia)? The sexy, former stripper assistant (Elaine Joyce)? A reporter (Murray Hamilton) with an axe to grind? 

Brian Kerwin, Elvia Allman, Conrad Janis, and Robert Hogan round the cast out in this curious take on the locked-room mystery trope featuring scenes of Jessica Fletcher speaking like a Park Avenue snob and a barfly whilst under hypnosis, once again being sort of very famous, and impulsively hopping on the back of a motorcycle. There are WAY too many characters, but we'll try to sort it out!

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE we--BAN THE BALLET--excuse us, we're having an interruption from the wings.  Anyway, what we have to see--BAN THE BALLET!--Ok look, we're trying to have a lovely little slice of culture over here. 

We and Jessica (Angela Lansbury) head to Boston to check out some Soviet dancers prance about; and our anti-ballet activist Velma Rodecker (Jessica Nelson) is having none of it, decrying the communist influence brought on by this treasured artform in 1984 counter-revolutionary America. 

Indeed, the Cold War is heating up in this episode, DEATH TAKES A CURTAIN CALL, particularly having noted sexy dancer Alexander Masurov (George de la Pena) and his beautiful consort Natalia (Vicki Kriegler) taking center stage. (Or not, as the case may be; scandal breaks out when they defect and miss their bows!) Oh, and someone turns up dead backstage.

Did the dancers do it to get away? Was it another of the ballet company in a moment of passion? The lecherous stagehand in-between passes made at The Other Pretty Dancer (Kerry Armstrong)? Or is it the aggressively patriotic demonstrator? Rhoda, say it ain't so!

Can Jessica solve the crime and avoid giving these naive, harmless Russian kids up to the KGB officer (William Conrad chewing the scenery like a fine borscht) hot on their tracks? Maybe, with the help of Sheriff Tupper (Tom Bosley), Captain Cragg (Claude Akins), and the man who got her into all this (Hurd Hatfield). 

Skip Fleming, Dane Clark, and (not that) Paul Rudd join the cast in this dramatic tale of love, intrigue, suspicious fishermen with limited vocabulary, and what we think really happened to have Claude Akins leave the series. 

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, we try to solve a variation on the classic murder made behind a door, locked from the inside! 

The Worst Person Ever this week comes in the form of theme park owner and total maniac "Horrible" Horatio (James Coco), who tries to strongarm Jessica (Angela Lansbury) into... writing a story for his next attraction? We don't know; it's not important. What's important is now he's dead! And we're not hurting for suspects. 

There's the dreamy but unseemly engineer (Kristoffer Tabori), the gruff Swede (Gene Evans), the former showgirl widow (Christine Belford), the mousey and somewhat alarmist secretary (Kim Darby), the nebbish accountant (Richard Sanders), and the mad man's hired muscle (George DiCenzo). Surely one of them is responsible... but how?!  Our useless detective is John Schuck, while Jessica's family connection, Lieutenant James Stephens, is also on the case. 

Things are quickly complicated by a second murder featuring the best visual effects a dummy hurled off a balcony can accomplish. Further horrors await us with a ghoulish oversized James Coco head, mysterious cat noises, a hangman execution gone wrong kind-of-sort-of, and dreadfully inconsistent office decor. 

Grab a snack and a sensible turtleneck because WE'RE OFF TO KILL THE WIZARD!

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, it's Jessica versus... the brake pedal! 

A driverless car creates mayhem at a Cabot Cove picnic, and it takes the combined forces of Sherrif Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), Captain Ethan Cragg (Claude Akins), and mystery writer Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) to figure it out. 

When the car sends one man into the hospital, another to the morgue, and our heroine careening towards a cliff, the suspect is naturally the town's eccentric gadgeteer, Van Johnson (Hollywood pretty boy and famously closeted icon, with just the darkest eyelash line).

We also meet his handsome son (Tony Holiday), the imminent daughter-in-law (Leslie Andler), and the delightful age-appropriate ladyfriend (underrated legend June Allyson in a series of fabulous chunky jewelry). Which of them had the motive, the opportunity, and the know-how to make this mechanical menace?!

We'll find out together on this winding road that brings us memorable scenes of Jessica playing arcade games, an unexpected cacophony of dogs, thrilling gas station receipt epiphanies, and baseball players with the lowest of self-protection instincts. It's HIT, RUN AND HOMICIDE! 

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, Jessica faces one of her toughest antagonists: stairs. Oh, and a pretty boy secretary who may be trying to kill her. You know how it is.

Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) is tasked with a lecture at a prestigious Washington state university where she also happens to need a typist; she encounters this dreamy-eyed co-ed David Tolliver (Andrew Stevens), already a suspect in the death of a purported older woman lover.  The body's barely cold, and he seems to have set his sights on his new employer, and he has more on his mind than how many words a minute he can type.  Despite Jessica's reservations, she succumbs to his dictation, and soon enough there's another body... This time, of a student who may be sleeping with him (and two different professors!) Everyone's getting some, except for Peter Graves' long-suffering personal assistant, Lois Nettleton, who delivers a tour de force monologue late in the script.  

In what was an alternative pilot, this one veers in a Colombo direction and is the better for it with a gaggle of horny guest stars, including Peter Graves, Grant Goodeve, Greg Morris, and Lory Walsh, all seen against the backdrop of a rotten avocado green, wood-trimmed lecture hall. Who could possibly have time to study, let alone commit one or two different murders? The ex-husband? Professor #1? Professor #2? The neglected administrative professional? The sex-crazed psycho with a granny complex? Angela Lansbury does her own stunts and more for LOVERS... AND OTHER KILLERS!

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, Jessica is investigating the death of the fox-hunting Virginian patriarch of the worst family ever, which she refuses to believe is an accident. 

She might be right, as the greedy children (the deadwood, the kook, the lush) are shocked to learn they've been passed over for his inheritance. The actual beneficiary? The family dog Teddy; and they are all peeved as hell.  Chaos is amplified when an unexpected decapitation(!) in the second act points the finger squarely at Teddy. (It'll make sense when it happens, sort of.) 

Could the darling pooch actually have done it? Or was it Jessica's beloved cousin, Abby (Lynn Redgrave), the groundskeeper (Tom Cassidy), the opportunist hick next door (Gregory Walcott), the despondent niece (Cherie Currie), or the not-a-big-city lawyer (Dean Jones).  

"It's a Dog's Life" also stars Cathryn Damon, Jared Martin, and Lenore Kasdorf as the spoiled rich kids, and Roger Miller as this week's detective who resents that Jessica (Angela Lansbury) is smarter than him. It's a mystery with drugged horses, casual confederate flags, and missing bicycle clips, all leading to a shocking courtroom finale that'll push all your buttons. 

Jessica Fletcher is going to Hollywood to try to stop her first novel, The Corpse Danced At Midnight, from being turned into a grotesque, tacky movie set in a roller disco graveyard! And she is super pissed. 

TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE, someone's killed off the douche movie producer!  Was it his current (somewhat age-inappropriate) lover, the ingenue actress?  Her new secret lover,  the hunky lead of the picture?  His ex-lover, the costume designer, who is giving her best Redgrave impression?  The unscrupulous movie director who looks an awful lot like Gomez Addams? The script writer?  Elinor?! Or, is it indeed Jessica in her first outing as an actual suspect?  We kind of hope so.

Take in a huge cast of terrible people, mixing pills with scotch and Diet Coke, an extravagant waste of unused wardrobe, missing buttons, and a beach house party no one can stand to be a part of for more than five minutes.  HOORAY FOR HOMICIDE stars Angela Lansbury and Claude Akins alongside John Astin, John Saxon, Melissa Sue Anderson, Samantha Eggar, and a terribly underused Lyle Waggoner.

We are meeting one of Jessica's many relatives, niece Victoria (Genie Francis) in San Francisco TONIGHT ON MURDER, SHE WROTE. She shares her concerns with Aunt Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) that the groom-to-be Howard (Jeff Conaway of Taxi and Grease) might be seeing another woman. But, surprise! HE is the other woman!  

Yes, naturally the lipstick on his collar is his own, as Howard is a female impersonator at Les Champignons, a cabaret run by Martin Landau.  A surprisingly heterosexual mystery solved only leads to another heterosexual mystery to resolve: who killed the boss if not the fiance in a caftan? Is it the glamorous wife? Her lover, who's yet another heterosexual drag queen? The drum-playing comedian?  The absolute queen of a maître d'?  

Jessica joins Lt. Floyd Novack (Harry Guardino) to solve the case against Howard. Bart Braverman, Gabe Kaplan, Barbara Rhoades, and the always stunning and eyeball-rolling Carol Lawrence are also featured in the third episode of the Murder She Wrote, BIRDS OF A FEATHER.