Midsomer Murders: "Happy Families" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, ITV [Independent Television], American Public Television, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Thursday, October 19) at 10 p.m. I watched a Midsomer Murders episode on KPBS, a rerun of a show called “Happy Families” from 2021 in which the assistant to the show’s lead, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon, who’s been playing the part since this show’s inception in 1997), is the good-looking but rather stuck-up Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). “Happy Families” deals with an unscrupulous board-game entrepreneur, Victor Karras (Stuart Mulligan), whose wife Eleanor (Rachael Stirling) is pregnant – not with their child but as a surrogate for her sister, Alicia Matheson (Georgina Rich), whose rather hapless husband Paul (Paul Bazely) apparently couldn’t get her pregnant in the normal way (though the actual biological parentage of the child Eleanor is carrying for Alicia is carefully unspecified by writer Nick Hicks-Beach). In addition to making high-end designer board games (if you didn’t know or care there are high-end board games, I share your confusion), Victor hosts role-playing parties at which fake “murders” are staged and the guests are challenged to see if they can solve them. A young man gets “killed” as one of the victims in Victor’s latest party, and then Victor himself is killed for real when a statue of the ancient Egyptian dog-god Anubis falls and impales him. Later it turns out that getting stabbed by a falling statue isn’t what killed Victor; he really died from cyanide poisoning, though this still begs the question of who administered it and when. Also on the scene are Hugo Welles (Adrian Edmondson), who played a Scotland Yard inspector in the mystery “murder” game; and his wife Helen (Caroline Quentin), who wrote a game Victor Karras ripped off from her decades before the main story. They have a son named Andrew (Ed White), who’s concocted a revenge scheme against Victor Karras that involves him embezzling from Karras and using the money to buy him expensive watches, TV’s and other doodads. Andrew is doing this in cahoots with Karras’s assistant, Joshua Kilbride (Greg Lockett), and there are hints in Hicks-Beach’s script and Audrey Cooke’s direction that the two are Gay lovers.

Naturally Hugo Welles is so into playing a Scotland Yard detective that he makes a ham-handed attempt to solve the murder, though he actually uncovers a key clue – a plastic ring discarded outdoors by the killer, which we see well before we understand its significance. There’s also the character of Karras’s daughter Danni (Vanessa Emme) and her African-British boyfriend Noah Adomakoh (Aki Omoshaybi). Noah started a relationship with her only to get his hands on her dad’s money to develop a new invention, a sort of Super-Glue with which he claims to be able to repair any plate or cup as good as new – though when he presents her with a sample of his handiwork, she gets angry and hurls it into the wall, disintegrating it. This actually provides Barnaby and Winter a key clue to solving the case; in the ruins of Noah’s destroyed plate they find a shard of blue glass with the name “Nitrile,” which I recognized as the material medical gloves are made of now that so many medical personnel turned out to have allergies to latex. But it also is a sort of poison that releases cyanide if it’s heated, and Barnaby and Winter deduce that this was how Victor Karras was murdered. By this time we’ve already had our second victim – Hugo Welles, who had grandly announced that he’d solved the real-life murder and was going to announce it to all and sundry – as well as Alicia Matheson, who is stricken with a mild case of cyanide poisoning but survives. Later Barnaby and Winter declare that Alicia was the real killer – she faked the attack on herself to divert suspicion, slipped the nitrile into Victor’s vape kit so he’d die 12 hours later the next time he used it, and stabbed Hugo and pushed his body down a flight of stairs to keep him from revealing her as a killer. There’s also a red-herring subplot about a private detective Victor hired to find out who was “leaking” his principal ideas for games to his competitors, and the giant puzzle box in which Victor hid his report.

I mostly liked this Midsomer Murders episode, though it fell victim to one of the most frequent traps of this show: the unraveling of so many different crimes, each with little or nothing to do with the others, it’s not only hard to keep track but most of the dramatis personae end up arrested for one thing or another. Alicia’s motive was that she feared Victor and Eleanor were going to double-cross her and keep the baby (ya remember the baby?) for themselves; she’d overheard them talking about building a nursery for the child but didn’t hear the second half of the conversation, which was that they were surprising Alicia and Paul by presenting them with a full-fledged nursery. The show’s ironic title – there are several families depicted but none of them are really happy – is underscored by a postlude in which John Barnaby tells his long-suffering wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) that he’s been offered a promotion but it will involve doing desk work instead of actually investigating cases in the field, and ultimately he turns it down despite her long-standing discontent of how much time his job takes and the long absences it puts him through. Overall this was an O.K. Midsomer Murders episode but I’ve seen better.