It is my wish for this blog to incorporate autobiographical writing with whatever I happen to be watching. I suppose whatever I’m watching is personal as well, since it says a lot about how a person is doing in an online quiz sort of way. Tell us what shows you like, and we’ll tell you what kind of cat-themed dessert you are. I can’t write fiction. but I’d love to somehow combine literary criticism and a personal blog, with maybe a dash of magical realism. And then I’d like to gain a thousand readers. I’m going to confine the personal stuff mostly to the end of the post, so you don’t have to scroll through it to get to the film and TV criticism.

Ahem. Midsomer Murders. It’s not my favorite homicide puzzle program, but there sure are a lot of episodes, and I’ve seen them all at least twice. It’s a good choice for group viewing when you feel like watching TV with the family. It’s the chain restaurant of detective shows. Some of the episodes are a bit mean-spirited even for me, a person who has seen and enjoyed all of Lucio Fulci’s horror films. It’s not the gore here, but the evil intent that gets to me. There’s a certain actress I can’t watch at all in anything because of what she did in the pilot episode.

Can I get a synopsis? An ancient painting has been discovered in the basement of a church in a village that’s always this close to washing away when it rains. It must be preserved, by all costs in the eyes of an ambitious lady vicar who wants to turn this church into a pilgrimage destination. She has to get a highfalutin ladies’ man of a professor in to save the painting, which happens to depict medieval torture. People start getting killed in the ways shown in the painting, if you really study the deaths under a magnifying glass. There’s a woman killed who was trying to leave her drinker of a husband. Then the husband’s dad is killed while trying to destroy evidence that (as he thinks) his wrong’un son killed his wife. Then the professor, who might be collateral damage but that actor’s character should have been screen killed back when he was guest starring on Lewis so I’ll allow it. There’s also a father and son fighting over whether they’re going to run a shop together, and a cancer patient and his daughter who are going to get evicted by the church so the church can sell their church-owned cottage to pay to restore the painting.

My favorite thing about British TV is spotting people who have been on other shows and imagining they were cast here because they played that part there. Two of the main suspects here played detectives on other shows. One of them was even a star star, not a guest star, on Lewis!

Another mystery trope I like is when the sergeant is running like hell to catch the fleeing suspect and the inspector catches them instead by using a car, or a boat, or a foot, or a bowling ball, because it highlights the inspector’s superior intellect and ingenuity, as well as their strategic conservation of energy. Barnaby does the car thing here in this episode.

Let Us Prey isn’t pilot episode levels of nasty, centering majorly around the second Inspector Barnaby’s anxiety about the upcoming birth of his first child as well as the upcoming displacement of the Barnabys’ dog who was the real star of all the episodes he was on. The episode contrasts Barnaby’s life, and the lives of his coworkers, with the suspects’ lives, which is what this show has always done best. I believe you call this device a foil. The pathologist and the sergeant are in a landlord/tenant situation where one of them is more “Type A” than the other one and they complain behind each other’s backs, and in contrast the church is going to evict their ill tenant. Barnaby is already worried about how his child is going to turn out, what kind of parent he is going to be, and this is set up against the three problematic parent/child combos in the village where the murders are going on.

Some people don’t like the extent to which Midsomer focuses on the detectives’ families, but I think it’s what sets this show apart from all the other procedurals, that is, when you aren’t having to suspend your disbelief during the remarkable coincidences that insert those family members as direct witnesses to many of the crimes due to their incredibly specific hobbies. That’s the other focus of the show: people in the villages have obsessions that masquerade as interests. It might be bell-ringing or mushroom picking or crop circles or pretending it’s 1941, but they will kill for it.

When I was in college, part of the literary criticism I was assigned was analyzing movies. This was actually a big part of it. Now I feel more like doing it with TV shows. Back then, TV wasn’t as elaborate as it is now. Now, I can binge watch TV shows that are feature length, with long screenplays that contain the accompanying poetic devices that exist (or that I believe I see) in any writing. That’s why I chose to write about this episode, because I thought it was such a good example of Barnaby as a foil for the other parents in the story.

And here comes a little bit of magical realism, or maybe just magical thinking. You can watch Midsomer on any number of platforms, but I prefer YouTube because I like seeing which of its million episodes YouTube is going to recommend next. Today YouTube threw me this episode of Midsomer that is about a flood, when we’ve been dealing here in Georgia with a bit of flooding from Hurricane Debby. Debby Downpour. You could say it’s just an AI assigning me this soggy episode because of viewing choices in my geographical area, but I think it’s the universe responding to my emotional fixation on the water standing in my yard. Part of my work-from-home scheme is, and has been for almost ten years, interacting with AI as requested by various universities’ researchers and grad students. And I can tell you that AI isn’t that smart. You can be in the middle of an assigned conversation with a chatbot who you’ve chosen to talk to about Studio Ghibli, and all of a sudden the bot starts talking about how well you’re dealing with your mental health challenges. Or maybe that’s a bad example when you’ve just admitted to a robot that you watch children’s anime.

I dread writing, and yet I feel periodically compelled to do it. And there are people who exist who like to read what I write. It’s been that way since I was in elementary school, at least since the 4th grade. I also dread reading more and more since the minor brain damage and attention issues from the bad chemo. There was a point where I couldn’t remember any nouns, but I have reason to believe (because I saw it on a British TV show) that that is more to do with the fact that I have been slammed into menopause early by “endocrine therapy.” Sometimes I will say something to my husband like, “did you put the thing in the thing, the thing honey, the thing????” And the things are a laundry pod in the washing machine. I forget what I’m saying in the middle of a sentence, but only when I’m talking. It doesn’t happen when I’m typing.

Despite having to force myself to read books, which I will then read all in one sitting after renewing them at the library twice and still incurring a fine, for some reason I like to read what I’ve written. This is fun particularly if it’s been a long time since I wrote it, because it feels like someone else wrote it. Sometimes I don’t remember having written it. These are the best reads. I might not like to reread this particular post because it’s a mess.

I wrote a lot more about my health, and then I deleted it. I want to rant about it, but then I think it’s so self-pitying. We have this narrative, that everyone’s in love with, of the brave sick person. I’m not brave, I’m pissed off, and broke. And I’m not even dying. Did you know that you could spend six years in active cancer treatment and not even be terminal? I thought you either got better or died, until it happened to me. It’s just your bank account and credit that die. And some people are like AI, they don’t respond in a way that makes any sense. I’m not getting into that in detail, but some people bully people they know are ill. The only explanation I can think of is that it makes them feel like cancer won’t happen to them too if they go ahead and dehumanize me. And on top of all that my digestive system is never going to be the same. I can’t eat a banana. I can’t even cut up a banana for someone else to eat or my fingers swell up. Do you know what it’s like to live in the south and be unable to eat banana pudding? It’s like a hurricane on your wedding day.

All this, and I haven’t even murdered anyone. Or even gotten a hose and sprayed an 800 year old painting with water. But if you touch one of my Animal Crossing amiibo cards I might get a bit shirty.