Midsomer Murders

The Blood in the Rose Garden

There’s a long-running joke among British TV viewers that the deadliest place on the planet is not a battlefield or a dark city street, but some lovely little village tucked away in Midsomer. Move there and your odds of being poisoned, bludgeoned, or impaled before the village fete wraps up seem alarmingly high. I have no idea how anyone keeps buying property there. And yet this is exactly the absurdity *Midsomer Murders* has fed on for almost thirty years. It takes the postcard charm of the English countryside, all thatched roofs and tidy gardens, and splashes it with murder.



Drawn from Caroline Graham's Chief Inspector Barnaby novels, the show lives in a reality that obeys its own rules. This is not gritty crime drama. The murders are elaborate to the point of camp. (A woman flattened by a giant wheel of blue cheese? A man drowned in a vat of eggs and live eels? Of course.) A reviewer at *DVD Talk* once caught the show's wavelength perfectly, calling it "delightfully droll" with a "wicked, sick sense of fun." That's really the whole trick. People die constantly, but the show almost never wants you devastated. These killings play more like twisted puzzle mechanics dreamt up by someone with a taste for hedges, gardens, and malicious whimsy.

You can feel that contrast in nearly every episode. A standard crime scene here starts with sunlight on a village lawn, bees humming, maybe a vicar calmly pouring tea. Then the scene flips and there’s a local landowner skewered in a greenhouse with some absurdly old-fashioned weapon. The camera doesn't wallow in suffering. It moves on quickly, treating the grotesque as one more local oddity. Whether you find that distance off-putting or delicious probably depends on how much patience you have for cozy mysteries, but the show works because it never mistakes itself for solemn prestige television.



At the center of all this pastoral lunacy is Barnaby himself. For the first fourteen years, John Nettles gave Tom Barnaby a tired sort of authority that held the whole thing together. When Neil Dudgeon stepped in during 2011 as cousin John Barnaby, it could easily have thrown the series off balance. Instead, Dudgeon found a slightly different key. He moves with more weight, often carrying himself like a man permanently baffled by what these villagers are capable of. Watch him question some deeply unstable local squire and you see it right away. His expression barely shifts, his blinking is just a little too slow, and he takes in the madness with this dry, patient disbelief. That wry, worn empathy is what keeps the show grounded even when it starts floating off into nonsense.



The more recent seasons, though, do feel like they’re pushing against the limits of their own formula. Once you’re trying to dream up your 400th distinctive way to kill a parish council member, self-parody is hard to avoid. Some episodes sound as if they were pieced together from scraps of stronger ones. You can hear the machinery a little too clearly.

Still, I come back to it. There’s comfort in the repetition. In a world that keeps getting messier, *Midsomer Murders* promises a familiar order: mild skies, charming villages, wealthy eccentrics with ugly secrets, and by the end a sensible man in an unfortunate suit putting things right. The theremin theme starts up, and for a moment everything settles. At least until the next fete.