"Mr. And Mrs. Murder" is a pleasant enough series, if you can get past the silly premise. Another entry in the by-now-rather-tired "Civilians Who Are Better At Police Work Than The Police" genre - you know, where the main characters have full-time private sector jobs that in actuality would keep them much too busy to do anything else, if they *did* their jobs instead of spending most of their time playing amateur detective - this one offers as said civilians Charlie and Nicola Buchanan, a husband and wife team of industrial cleaners who specialize in crime scenes. Hired to tidy up murder locales and restore them to normal well after the police forensic team has already gone over everything, they are inexplicably able to turn up all sorts of physical evidence and background facts that the real detectives somehow overlooked or conveniently didn't follow up on. And, of course, they wind up solving the cases. Yeah. Right....
We're talking well-trodden ground here, in the tradition of "Murder, She Wrote", "Rosemary And Thyme", "Father Brown", etc. The writing is actually decent though and does a good job of avoiding clichés, and the mysteries are pretty original and manage to hold some surprises. But the premise just becomes more and more absurd as the episodes progress and we watch our protagonists - whose job, I will point out again, is to CLEAN - staging re-enactments, following and/or questioning suspects, conducting unauthorized searches of private property (usually after gaining access under false pretenses), and in general demonstrating an almost pathologically obsessive preoccupation with matters completely outside their professional jurisdiction. One begins to wonder: If they really enjoy detective work so much, why not just *become* private investigators already?
One might also wonder whether anyone in the local constabulary ever takes any initiative at all in trying to uncover the truth behind the crimes, because it certainly never seems like that's the case. In the other series mentioned above the police are portrayed as capable, or at least functional, but in this show the only detective we ever see reports to the Buchanans to share confidential info and get updates and instructions, almost as if he is working under their supervision rather than the other way around.
Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart do have a very good chemistry as the leads, even if their characters are always a little too "on" and their banter a little formulaic. Potentially more fun are Jonny Pasvolsky as the couple's nice-guy police contact/friend and Lucy Honigman as the reluctant niece who gets dragged into their shenanigans. It would be nice if the two of them got more screen time and more to do.
I suppose for some the show will pass muster as a disposable diversion, but I'm now just halfway through the first and only season and I find myself losing interest. I'm still not sure if I will watch all the remaining episodes. Grade: B-.
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