MIDSOMER MURDERS During the Quarantine

Midsomer Murders is a British mystery series that premiered 23 years ago. It's based on a series of novels by Caroline Graham. The earliest episodes aired on A & E. We don't watch American TV so, for all I know, everyone may know all about it. It may be prime time in America for all I know, but I doubt it.

The novels are interesting in that they're set in a mythical English county filled with one substantial town and many bucolic villages where life seems serene yet, under the surface, the most incredible depravity.

There's a whimsical quality to the telling of the stories. The combination of peaceful English beauty, the amazing depravity and the lighthearted telling of the tales makes for a unique sort of entertainment.

The first of the novels was produced in England by ITV in 1997. All of the novels published by that time were adapted into 100ish minute made for television movies, then, more shows were produced based on the main characters in the novels. To this point, 124 movies have been produced.

Picking them up on sales, as of yesterday, we now own all 124 on DVD or Blue ray.

There's a Midsomer Murders page on Facebook that we follow. It put together a count of the 50 favorite episodes by asking followers to vote for their top five. The Facebook page counts the episodes down, from 50 to 1, one each day. Yesterday, was number 27, Shot at Dawn, one of my more favorite, but not one of my top five.

Beginning in the high 30s, we started watching the episode of the day as a sort quarantine project...whatever you can do to bring structure to life, eh.

Anyway, neither of us got our lists of our five favorites in. I'm, of course, rooting for my fave, The Axeman Cometh, and my next fave, The Magician's Nephew (in which a  character, who doesn't get murdered, discovers pages of Tyndale's New Testament) and my third fave, Hidden Depths, which contains two of our favorite murders. (I suspect that this may come in at number 1 in the countdown.)

The show can be sort of plodding. I certainly don't recommend it for everyone but, we're geezers and its not too fast, or LOUD, for us.

And, for the next few weeks, we'll have something to do.