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Post by Sarge on Aug 8, 2020 8:22:26 GMT
Elementary starts with promise but devolves quickly into generic buddy cop (except they are private detectives) show. Sherlock wanes as Watson waxes. Lucy Liu really shines though. By the time I quit watching it had turned into the British style of mystery where it's all red herring clues and at the end they pick some character at random to be "guilty" and Sherlock pulls evidence out of his butt that proves it.
If it hasn't been mentioned, The Murdoch Mysteries (Canadian), is a steam punkish Sherlockian mystery series about a turn of the century Toronto detective that invents modern forensics with Victorian science. Almost every episode has a minor or major historical figure, either cameo or "guest star." Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, Tesla, AC Doyle, various other authors, inventors, scientists, explorers, and characters appear as their famous selves or sometimes pre-fame.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Aug 8, 2020 8:48:09 GMT
Do we have any Foyle’s War fans here? I enjoyed Foyle`s War.
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 8, 2020 13:54:24 GMT
Do we have any Foyle’s War fans here? I enjoyed Foyle`s War. Favorite eps?
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 8, 2020 13:58:05 GMT
Elementary starts with promise but devolves quickly into generic buddy cop (except they are private detectives) show. Sherlock wanes as Watson waxes. Lucy Liu really shines though. By the time I quit watching it had turned into the British style of mystery where it's all red herring clues and at the end they pick some character at random to be "guilty" and Sherlock pulls evidence out of his butt that proves it. If it hasn't been mentioned, The Murdoch Mysteries (Canadian), is a steam punkish Sherlockian mystery series about a turn of the century Toronto detective that invents modern forensics with Victorian science. Almost every episode has a minor or major historical figure, either cameo or "guest star." Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, Tesla, AC Doyle, various other authors, inventors, scientists, explorers, and characters appear as their famous selves or sometimes pre-fame. Thanks! Well, I like Lucy Liu, and I’m perfectly willing to give Elementary a try, but I’d really like to go in with a list of best episodes to see if I do like it. Obviously I don’t like all red herrings, but I do like “the British style of mystery” in such shows as Death in Paradise and Jonathan Creek. If Holmes just “pulls evidence out of his butt that proves” the solution, though, I’m not sure it’s my cup of tea. I used to like Murdoch, but the cop-out solutions and often dreadful acting started grating on me. I think my favorite episode was the one with the secret passage in the haunted house, though the (first?) Houdini one was OK.
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Post by Feologild Oakes on Aug 8, 2020 15:20:28 GMT
Fifty ships War Games The French Drop The White Feather The Hide
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 8, 2020 15:23:12 GMT
Fifty ships War Games The French Drop The White Feather The Hide Thx!
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Post by Nalkarj on Aug 30, 2022 18:08:10 GMT
I’ve been writing quite a bit about mystery TV shows, so I thought of revising my Top 10. Here goes nothin’. (Underneath each of them I’ll list three favorite episodes.)
1. Jonathan Creek “Black Canary,” “Jack in the Box,” “Mother Redcap”
2. Agatha Christie’s Poirot “Death on the Nile,” “Five Little Pigs,” “After the Funeral”
3. Monk “Mr. Monk and the Sleeping Suspect,” “Mr. Monk and the Naked Man,” “Mr. Monk and the Garbage Strike”
4. Columbo “Try and Catch Me,” “Prescription: Murder,” “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine”
5. Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994) “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “The Solitary Cyclist,” “The Final Problem”
6. Agatha Christie’s Marple “The Murder at the Vicarage,” “A Murder Is Announced,” “The Body in the Library”
7. Death in Paradise “Wicked Wedding Night,” “Predicting Murder,” “Stab in the Dark”
8. Murder, She Wrote (yes!) “Trial by Error,” “The Corpse Flew First Class,” “Murder Takes the Bus”
9. Ellery Queen “The Adventure of the Lover’s Leap,” “The Adventure of the Chinese Dog,” “The Adventure of Miss Aggie’s Final Performance”
10. Sherlock “The Sign of Three,” “A Study in Pink,” “The Lying Detective”
Notes: I’m not sure Sherlock should be on here—it’s so obsessed with its own cleverness (a Moffat-Gatiss trademark!) that I find it annoying. “The Sign of Three” is a good mystery, though—not shockingly clever, but nicely clued and thought-out. But I couldn’t think of anything else to put in its place.
I like The Rockford Files, but it’s usually more action than mystery. I like some of what I’ve seen of Les petits meurtres d’Agatha Christie, but I haven’t seen enough episodes to be fair. I love Gravity Falls, but it’s not exactly mystery (though it is mystery-adjacent).
I’m open to suggestions.
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Post by Chalice_Of_Evil on Aug 31, 2022 0:22:56 GMT
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Post by taylorfirst1 on Aug 31, 2022 17:02:47 GMT
Only Murders in the Building
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Post by forca84 on Aug 31, 2022 17:37:14 GMT
Bear with me..."Foyle's War" was excellent... The "Sunflower" episode (I think that's it title.) was haunting.
I also enjoyed "The Tunnel" (based on "The Bridge". Which has been remade a few times.) The American version of "The Bridge" was decent too but only lasted a season.
I enjoyed "Inspector Lewis", and "Endeavour", and some "Wallander", "Rosemary & Thyme" is cozy. Watched a bit of "Inspector Alleyn" as well.
"Broadcurch" from what I've seen was good. The American version was okay.
As I said in a previous topic I binged "Midsomer Murders". Need to watch the latest batch that was recently filmed. Otherwise I'm burned out on that show for now.
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Post by Sarge on Sept 23, 2022 5:29:33 GMT
Poirot Sherlock Holmes w/Jeremy Brett The Murdoch Mysteries Kolchak the Nightstalker The X-Files Psyche Fringe Lost The Lincoln Lawyer (does this count?) Dead Still Evil (I've only seen S1)
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Post by drystyx on Oct 1, 2022 18:59:42 GMT
Looks like a good enough list. I just don't see that many TV mystery programs.
To me, I give thumbs up to any such list that doesn't include the really bad ones like "Murder She Wrote", 'CSI" shows, or "In the Heat of the Night".
I wonder if you consider anthology series. Since my viewing of mystery TV shows is limited, I'm including anthology series that either are mystery, or include a lot of mystery. I'm including Twilight Zone, and not separating the old and new Twilight Zone.
1. Perry Mason (for the atmosphere I really love, and that's what keeps it in first place)
2. Twilight Zone (Mystery in that you didn't know for sure if it would be sci-fi or mystery, and my favorite episodes are Jeopardy Room, Spur of the Moment, Stopover in a Quiet Town, Mr. Garrity and the Graves, the Brain Center at Whipples, I Dream of Genie, On Thursday We Leave For Home, The Fear, Death's Head Revisted, The Grave, Five Characters in Search of an Exit, Nothing in the Dark, The Hunt, One More Pallbearer, Showdown with Rance McGrew, A Piano in the House, To Serve Man, Little Girl Lost, The Little People, Hocus Pocus and Frisby, The Gift, The King Will Not Return, Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room, The Howling Man, Eye of the Beholder, A Penny For Your Thoughts, the Odyssey of Flight 33, Mr. Dingle the Strong, the Rip Van Winkle Caper, The Silence, Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up, The Obsolete Man, One For the Angels, Where is Everyboydy?, Judgment Night, And When the Sky was Opened, Third From the Sun, I Shot an Arrow Into the Air, The Hitch-Hiker, Elegy, The Purple Testament, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, A Stop at Willoughby, Nightmare as a Child, and The After Hours.). With all that, one would think it would be in first place, but the atmosphere of Perry Mason is what makes it first.
3. Columbo (for the cool)
4. Kraft Suspense Theater (my favorite ones are "The Jack is High" and "Leviathan 5)
5. Alfred Hitchcock (my favorite ones are 1. Richard Long and Robert Redford as gambling brothers 2. the one where Hitch makes it obvious that the gourment meal is former members of the club, but the fat guy keeps wanting to meet the chef. The fact that he makes it obvious makes it super funny, on purpose. 3. Walter Matthau and Robert Vaughan as vicious gang members)
6. Mannix (on the surface, it seems like just another show about a super tough hero, but there is a subtle iconoclastic trend to almost every episode)
7. Cold Case (I usually don't go for shows that rely a lot on mood music, but the mood music actually fits here, with a lot of actual inspiration and creativity, as well as credibility, which the other modern mystery shows lack)
8. The Practice (the characters made this work)
9. Simon and Simon (the interplay between the two brothers, and the supporting characters made something out of what otherwise would be a weak show. Mind you, this isn't a "really good series", but I don't see many mystery shows, and these last two make the list out of "process of elimination")
10. Monk (the character Monk is awesome. Not so crazy about the rest of the show)
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Post by theravenking on Oct 1, 2022 20:19:59 GMT
Just caught up on a few of the latest season/series (2014) of Jonathan Creek. It’s awful. That’s really too bad, because it was one of the greatest mystery TV shows of all time: entertaining, funny, with ingenious plots. (The 1998 Christmas special, The Black Canary, is super-brilliant.) It’s not a change in talent: Creator David Renwick has written every episode, these last few included. Unbelievably, though, for this latest season he’s excised everything interesting or amusing about his own character (originally a cranky, eccentric magician’s ingénieur who lived in a windmill and whose trademark was a mane of shaggy hair and a rumpled old duffle coat) to make him a high-powered businessman (huh?!) who gets married and moves into a Midsomer Murders-y village. Again: Huh?! As if the characterization whiplash weren’t enough (actor Alan Davies is good enough to sell the change, mostly), Renwick seems to have lost all talent for plotting. The last Christmas specials before this, The Grinning Man and The Judas Tree, had their share of plot flaws ( The Judas Tree in particular), but they felt grand and interesting. In this season, Jonathan solves mysteries like these: How does a parish newsletter find gossip before anyone else? Why is a man peeing in the bushes? Was his wife’s mother having an affair? How on earth are these supposed to be interesting? Renwick doesn’t have to give us a murder every episode, but at least come up with a burglary or something more than peeing in the bushes! Gah. Worse, the first episode this season, “The Letters of Septimus Noone,” had an intriguing premise: a Columbo-esque inverted mystery in which we know who committed the crime and how, coupled with a spoof of Sherlock. Unfortunately, Renwick didn’t have the talent for the Sherlock spoof, so it went nowhere and, worse, was unfunny. The other mystery, Polly’s mother’s affair, was (1) boring and (2) obvious. The second episode, “The Sinner and the Sandman,” was such an unmitigated disaster that the best part was why Polly had a fear of carrots. (Renwick, by the way, apparently can’t think of mysteries that fill an entire episode, so he gives three different minor town mysteries.) I’m going to watch the third episode just to finish it off and then, unfortunately, give up on Jonathan Creek. If Renwick is no longer interested in mysteries, can he just end the show? — and if he still does want to continue the show, can he just hire a collaborator, ideally Robert Thorogood? At its zenith, though, the show was unrivaled for plotting brilliance, even by Thorogood’s Death in Paradise. Oh, how the mighty have fallen, all right. I still have the two Christmas specials Black Canary and Satan's Chimney to watch, but I think I'll stop after that.
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Post by theravenking on Oct 1, 2022 20:28:47 GMT
Jonathan Creek
Poirot
Sherlock Holmes (Jeremy Brett version)
The Killing - The Scandinavian original and technically speaking I only like the first season, but I believe that's one of the finest seasons of TV ever produced
Whitechapel
Veronica Mars - Season 1 was great, the 2nd a bit of a letdown
Twin Peaks - if we ignore the 2nd part of season 2
True Detective – Season 1
Pushing Daisies
Millennium
John Doe
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