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Midsomer Murders: Series 22
R0 - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (11th October 2023). |
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The Film
 There are seemingly an infinite number of towns and villages in Midsomer County, and just about everyone of them has a fκte or some other celebration where there will inevitably be a murder for a detective name Barnaby and his sergeant both of them essayed by different actors throughout twenty-three series so far not unlike the professional gardeners/amateur detectives of Rosemary & Thyme who keep getting hired to tend estate gardens where they always unearth a body. This time around, it's DCI John Barnaby (The Mrs. Bradley Mysterse' Neil Dudgeon) who replaced Tom Barnaby (Bergerac's John Nettles) from series thirteen onwards and Jamie Winter (Red Tails' Nick Hendrix) who replaced DS Charlie Nelson (Bohemian Rhapsody's Gwilym Lee) in series nineteen. Barnaby is supported by his wife Sarah (Heartbeat's Fiona Dolman), mostly-offscreen adolescent daughter, and dog Paddy while Winter's love life is occasionally a subplot and subject of needling by worldly coroner Fleur (Ted Lasso's Annette Badland) who has a saucy anecdote to go with each of her deductions. The series The Brokenwood Mysteries has been touted as "New Zealand's tongue-in-cheek answer to 'Midsomer Murders'" and, for someone who has not seen a full episode of Midsomer Murders since about series eight, a number of series twenty-two episodes play like less quirky episodes of The Brokenwood Mysteries with "The Wolf Hunter of Little Worthy" (88:57) built around killings committed by someone dressed as the winning entrant in a village meme contest who both slashes its victims with steel wolf claws and then finishes them off with a silver bullet to the skull, "Scarecrow Murders" (89:03) in which a killer dressed as a scarecrow for a village scarecrow festival stuffs their victims with straw and strings them up in poses, or "The Witches Of Angel's Rise" (89:19) in which the murders of several paranormal influencers at a village "Psychic Faere" may have something to do with a cult of pagan witches and/or a two girls who died in the same spot a year apart. Then there is "Happy Families" (88:53) in which Barnaby and Winter get stranded on an island with the players of a dinner murder mystery including The Comic Strip Presents' Adrian Edmondson as a comic relief actor who takes playing detective too far and a real murderer (the filming location West Wycombe Park had previously played host to a murder mystery game gone wrong in the American-produced/British-lensed Hercule Poirot television adaptation of Dead Man's Folly). More interestingly and divertingly-plotted are the likes of "The Stitcher Society" (88:58) in which a man (The Bank Job's Peter De Jersey) run out of town after beating a murder charge due to insufficient evidence returns and becomes the prime suspect when a new series of killings seem to target not just those that were responsible but those of them who have started to doubt his guilt. Also interesting is "For Death Prepare" (89:12) which initially seems like a retread of series one's episode "Death of a Hollow Man" with Barnaby's wife joining the cast of a local theater production in which rehearsals for the Midsomer Mummers' production of "The Pirates of Penzance" is disrupted when they discover the corpse of an unknown man sharing space in a treasure chest with pirate's booty. Both Sarah and Winter take the stage in a case which also "casts" Inspector Morse's former Detective Sergeant Lewis Kevin Whately as one of the suspects. Midsomer Murders fans, and cozy mystery viewers in general, may be getting exhausted by the once comforting "procedural" structure of these cases, with red herrings becoming more and more obvious, the plotting gymnastics necessary to withhold vital clues from the detectives and the viewers until roughly the eighty minute mark, as well as drawn out confessional monologues and the accompanying emotional breakdowns (which, in this case, only really works in the first case and is given a nice twist with a character so delusional as to blame everyone else in the room including the witness who misidentified them as the person who actually went to trial for their killing). Dudgeon is a bit too willing to cross over from wry into absurd compared to Nettles, and Hendrix's Winters is a bit too understated as the butt of jokes compared to some of his predecessors, while Dolman has little to do even in episodes where she is not just a fixture of the opening and closing scenes, and Badland's quirky and "shocking" older female character is just one of many such comic relief coroner characters. While series twenty-two may not inspire hope for the episodes of series twenty-three, it might turn viewers back to what came before in the prior twenty-one series. 
Video
Series twenty-two's six feature-length episodes are spread over three dual-layer DVDs - the series usually ranges from four to six episodes per series - and the anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen image is generally bright and crisp, showcasing the various home counties locations that make up the many fictional villages and towns while night sequences vary depending on the director, with some looking "cinematically" grainy and others looking slicker and evenly-lit. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a Dolby Digital 2.0 rendering of the stereo mixes which are dialogue-driven with occasional musical comment, spare atmospheric effects, and the occasional forceful directional effects associated with murder sequences; one of the few exceptions being the finale of "For Death Prepare" in which the killer takes the stage in a musical sequence intercut with the efforts of the detectives to free a character from a death trap. Optional English HoH subtitles are provided for all of the episodes. 
Extras
Extras are nothing special, consisting of a picture gallery (2:30), cast filmographies, an author Caroline Graham biography - although episodes this far along are only loosely based on her work - and broadcast dates of the series. 
Packaging
Annoying, all three discs are stacked on top of one another on the same hub, requiring fingernails to pry them apart and risking potential scratches on the playing surface by the embossed lettering on the labels.
Overall
While series twenty-two of Midsomer Murders may not inspire hope for the episodes of series twenty-three (which has already been broadcast but is not available on most streaming services yet), it might turn viewers back to what came before in the prior twenty-one series.
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