Midsomer Murders
Nov. 26th, 2012 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI’ve been watching Midsomer Murders, because it’s there, really. It’s on Netflix streaming and there are 18 seasons, with 4-5 episodes each, each episode an hour and three quarters, or 126 hours altogether.
They are WILDLY variant in quality, episode to episode. I can actually tell which ones are based on Caroline Graham’s books and which ones aren’t, though I’ve never read any, because Graham has a way of creating capital-C Characters—kooky undertakers and strange ladies that live in train carriages. She also has a bit of an obsession with incest and with crazy old people. I enjoy those episodes; they’re very twisty, and there’s always something interesting going on.
Then there are the…others. Like the episode about people dying in an old folks home where it’s revealed that they all just died of natural causes! No conspiracy or murder! Just senile old people being paranoid. WHAT AN EXCITING TWO HOURS OF TELEVISION.
There’s one more thing about the series that kind of bothers me, though. And that is Det. Barnaby’s wife, Joyce. She is the perfect little homemaker, in that she doesn’t appear to do anything else. In the first episode, she’s cooking him Julia Child-style lunches—by the end of that season, they’ve decided it would be more interesting if she were a terrible cook. And from then on she’s constantly getting ribbed about her awful cooking. But here is her role, from week to week: she cooks meals that Barnaby then jumps up from, having had an epiphany; she makes plans to spend time with him that he bails on; and she listens to his exposition. There’s a lot of her listening to him talking about his day, and not much reciprocated.
They have an adult daughter, Cully, who at least has her own life (as a stage actress). But she’s always around helping her mom take care of her dad. There’s a whole episode based around Joyce going to her mother’s and Cully thinking she’ll get father-daughter bonding time, only to spend the whole week cooking meals he doesn’t eat and making dinner plans he doesn’t show up for. This is a lesson, you see—she needs to learn that this is what it’s like to be married. (Not really exaggerating about this.)
And of course, should Joyce ever want something, like to renew her wedding vows, or do something on her own, like judge a local contest, it goes disastrously wrong and ends in murder. That’s the kind of show it is, but it also reinforces this image that she’s really not allowed to have her own life outside of her husband’s work.
These are all old saws, of course. And this little family is meant to be loving and idyllic. But the repetition of these sort of Norman Rockwell tropes—of having the woman constantly striving to have the perfect home only to have the man’s needs run rough shod all over it—is really grating to me, precisely because it is taken as so normal as to be completely unquestioned.
After a few episodes, I engaged in a thought experiment—are there any shows with female lead detectives who are married and who have the same dynamic? I can think of plenty where the woman has no success in love at all because she is so focused on her career. But I can only think of one, The Closer, where the woman is in a successful long-term relationship in which she is constantly running over the man’s emotional needs and breaking commitments because of her work. And even then, Fritz is an FBI agent and they frequently get into knock-down fights about her disregard for him. Compare that to Midsomer Murders, where Joyce not only doesn’t get mad about her husband’s behavior, but when her daughter does, counsels her to just accept it.
They are WILDLY variant in quality, episode to episode. I can actually tell which ones are based on Caroline Graham’s books and which ones aren’t, though I’ve never read any, because Graham has a way of creating capital-C Characters—kooky undertakers and strange ladies that live in train carriages. She also has a bit of an obsession with incest and with crazy old people. I enjoy those episodes; they’re very twisty, and there’s always something interesting going on.
Then there are the…others. Like the episode about people dying in an old folks home where it’s revealed that they all just died of natural causes! No conspiracy or murder! Just senile old people being paranoid. WHAT AN EXCITING TWO HOURS OF TELEVISION.
There’s one more thing about the series that kind of bothers me, though. And that is Det. Barnaby’s wife, Joyce. She is the perfect little homemaker, in that she doesn’t appear to do anything else. In the first episode, she’s cooking him Julia Child-style lunches—by the end of that season, they’ve decided it would be more interesting if she were a terrible cook. And from then on she’s constantly getting ribbed about her awful cooking. But here is her role, from week to week: she cooks meals that Barnaby then jumps up from, having had an epiphany; she makes plans to spend time with him that he bails on; and she listens to his exposition. There’s a lot of her listening to him talking about his day, and not much reciprocated.
They have an adult daughter, Cully, who at least has her own life (as a stage actress). But she’s always around helping her mom take care of her dad. There’s a whole episode based around Joyce going to her mother’s and Cully thinking she’ll get father-daughter bonding time, only to spend the whole week cooking meals he doesn’t eat and making dinner plans he doesn’t show up for. This is a lesson, you see—she needs to learn that this is what it’s like to be married. (Not really exaggerating about this.)
And of course, should Joyce ever want something, like to renew her wedding vows, or do something on her own, like judge a local contest, it goes disastrously wrong and ends in murder. That’s the kind of show it is, but it also reinforces this image that she’s really not allowed to have her own life outside of her husband’s work.
These are all old saws, of course. And this little family is meant to be loving and idyllic. But the repetition of these sort of Norman Rockwell tropes—of having the woman constantly striving to have the perfect home only to have the man’s needs run rough shod all over it—is really grating to me, precisely because it is taken as so normal as to be completely unquestioned.
After a few episodes, I engaged in a thought experiment—are there any shows with female lead detectives who are married and who have the same dynamic? I can think of plenty where the woman has no success in love at all because she is so focused on her career. But I can only think of one, The Closer, where the woman is in a successful long-term relationship in which she is constantly running over the man’s emotional needs and breaking commitments because of her work. And even then, Fritz is an FBI agent and they frequently get into knock-down fights about her disregard for him. Compare that to Midsomer Murders, where Joyce not only doesn’t get mad about her husband’s behavior, but when her daughter does, counsels her to just accept it.