Midsomer Murders: "The Debt of Lies" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2022, aired 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, December 12) I watched an episode of the long-running (26 seasons so far!) British policier TV series Midsomer Murders, about the fictional “Midsomer County” in central England and its two main police officers, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). This show was called “The Debt of Lies” and was a major disappointment, actually. Judging from the online synopsis (“Gated estate Challis Court is a tight-knit community for retired police officers, but when a new arrival is found dead, the other residents regard the murder as an affront; Barnaby realizes that the killer is likely an ex-police officer”) and a scene from the promos in which an avuncular Black guy catches on to Barnaby’s interview technique and said, “You’re trying to draw me out,” I had expected something considerably better in which the various residents of Challis Court would catch on to all of Barnaby’s and Hendrix’s interview tactics and there’d be a battle of wits between all the retired police officers over who got credit for solving the murders. It turned out that the murder victim – the first one, anyway – was recently retired police detective Elaine Bennet (Sabrina Franklyn), who’d formed a blended family with her African-British husband, Damian Bennet (Gary Beadle) and their two kids, her son Lionel (Lorne MacFadyen) from a previous (white) husband and his daughter Matty (Diana Yekinni) from his previous (Black) wife.

Unfortunately, even more than his predecessors on this entertaining but also infuriating show, writer Nicholas Hicks-Beach threw too many intrigues and crimes into the story, including a major heist that had occurred nine months previously and a cop, Giles Franklyn (Peter Polycarpou) who made off with the loot after his pension was revoked; his autistic son, who collects model cars (which turn out to have a major resale value as collectors’ items, which Dad has taken advantage of to launder the money from the robbery); and Billy Bevan (Geff Francis), who was previously arrested under his real name, Hirst, and changed it to be able to get hired for a job without the stigma of a criminal record. The opening featured Elaine Bennet’s car being found driven off the side of a road and crashed into a tree. Originally Barnaby and the other cops assume she committed suicide after having been diagnosed with a rare genetic illness, but then they discover that the brake line of her car was cut and therefore she was murdered. Then the medical examiner, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland), realizes she was actually killed by a blunt-force trauma to the head before she was put into the car, and later her husband Damian is also killed, tied up with threads to the crime board he’d made up on that old-time robbery. He too was clubbed from behind, and eventually the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Elaine’s son Lionel, who was angry with her because she’d never had him tested for her rare genetic disease and therefore he got married and sired a daughter not realizing that his kid could have inherited the same disease. There’s a certain degree of pathos in the ending, but that’s not enough to save this Midsomer Murders episode from a rather dull storyline in which the by-play between Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) is considerably more interesting than the main intrigue.