Midsomer Murders: "The Stitcher Society" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 25) I watched a KPBS-TV rerun of a 2021 episode of the series Midsomer Murders, about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England where a lot of people get murdered – which has prompted my husband Charles to make the same jokes about it he used to make about Cabot Cove, Maine on the TV show Murder, She Wrote: how long is it going to take before everyone in town is either a murder victim or in prison for killing them? This show was called “The Stitcher Society,” and judging from the title I’d expected it to be about murder in a sewing circle. That’s actually a plot point, as Gideon Tooms (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who inherits the Stitcher Society when his father Rueben Tooms (Silas Carson) becomes the first murder victim, wants to change the society’s name for precisely that reason. He’s also got a woman financial backer willing to invest in a major expansion of the group, whose real mission is to reach out to people who’ve had heart bypass surgery and get them involved in athletics and social work to give them a reason to live and stimulate their healing so they don’t just sit around feeling sorry for themselves. I had a heart bypass operation in December 2021 and I could identify with it, especially when the police department’s medical examiner, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland), refers to the surgical scar left behind on the chest as a “zipper,” to the brief confusion of the principal investigators, detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his partner, detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). (When I told a friend of mine who worked as a nurse about my bypass operation, he joked, “Oh, you’ve joined the zipper brigade.”)

The intrigue gets started when Toby Winter (Peter De Jersey), who five years previously was accused of murder and got off on a technicality. He shows up at a meeting of the Stitcher Society and the rest of the members are shocked that he was willing to show his face in town again even five years later. Julia Steinem (Nimmy March) is Toby’s sister and is convinced he didn’t kill anybody; to exonerate him she brings in private detective Mack McInally (Michael Nardone), but he uncovers evidence that she was at the scene of the murder five years before and tries to use that to blackmail her. Rueben had announced to the town that he had definitive evidence establishing Toby’s innocence, but he also turns out to be having an affair with Julia and planning to run away with her even though his wife Alberta (Lizzy McInnerny) carefully and conscientiously nursed him back to health after his operation. (My husband Charles did the same thing with me.) The real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Mimi Dagmar (Hannah Waddingham), a local realtor who sold John Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) their house – there’s a nice running gag in which she can never remember the cop’s wife’s name, though all her guesses begin with “S” – and was the sister of the original murder victim. Mimi actually was the initial killer – the two sisters got into an argument and Mimi picked up a nearby rock and bludgeoned her with it – and she also killed the other three victims (Rueben, McInally and a woman whom Gideon was about to throw out of the club because she, too, was convinced Toby Winter was innocent) because she was worried that Mack’s re-investigation of the case would point to her even though Mack had nothing. As he arrests Mimi at the end, Barnaby tells her, “You killed three people for nothing.” It was an unusually strong and chilling Midsomer Murders episode and a welcome relief from some of this show’s usual tropes, including the annoying habit of some of its writers to have multiple crimes uncovered in the middle of the investigation so it seems like half the town is being arrested at the conclusion.