My Life Is Murder: "The Boyfriend Experience" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 10) I watched an engaging if ultimately not very satisfying PBS telecast of an Australian crime show called My Life Is Murder, featuring Lucy Lawless – an interesting actress best known for playing Xena, the Warrior Princess, though most of her credits are for TV work. She plays Alexa Crowe, a police detective in Adelaide who retired after coming into an inheritance so large she never has to work again. Only she gets sucked into a murder investigation by her former police partner, Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). The death they’re investigating is that of wealthy industrialist Jennifer Chee (Lily Mor), who fell from a 19th floor balcony in the apartment of male escort Dylan Giroux (Lindsay Farris). The police officially ruled it an accident, but Kieran is convinced it was murder and Dylan becomes the prime suspect. My Life Is Murder was created by Rick Maier and Claire Tonkin, though the writer of this episode was Matt Ford. It didn’t help that the running time was just over 45 minutes, or that Ford gave us only two serious suspects: Dylan and Bob Noble (Grant Piro), the security guard in Dylan’s building who comes off as just twitchy enough to be the red herring Matt Ford wanted. To absolutely zero surprise, it turns out that Dylan is the killer; years previously he pushed another inconvenient client off another high-rise apartment balcony in another city. Then he was living under his birth name, David Gazzara, and apparently the reason he killed Jennifer was so she wouldn’t expose his previous crime. I’m not sure if I’ll watch this show again; as with a lot of cop shows on TV these days, the campy and soap opera-ish aspects just get in the way of the thrills. I was amused by the irony that both Bernard Curry and Lindsay Farris are hunks to die for (and we get lots of glimpses of one or the other of them topless, showing off their nipples – yum!), so if you watched this show and were told that one of them was playing a sex worker, they’re both so hot you probably couldn’t tell which one was supposed to be which!