My Life Is Murder: "Feet of Clay" (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, June 7) I watched an episode of the Australian (Melbourne-set) crime series My Life Is Murder, “Feet of Clay,” starring Lucy Lawless as former Melbourne police detective Alexa Crowe, who’s continually being recruited by her friend and old colleague from the force, detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), to reopen officially closed cases. The cold case she gets this time is the death of Christina Cortez (Eva Seymour), personal assistant to the legendary public relations genius Morgana Finch (Alin Sumarwata), who’s tall, rail-thin, drop-dead gorgeous and surrounded by a whole bevy of equally young, hot, nubile female staff members who virtually idolize her. She’s also considerably better at building her own “brand” than those of her clients, whoever they may be. Among the people Alexa interviews is Christina’s mother Rosa (Maria Theodorakis), who says her 22-year-old daughter thought she had landed her dream job but something turned her bitterly against Morgana, though mom didn’t know what it was. At this point I was thinking the show’s writer, Claire Tonkin (also listed as the show’s “co-creator”), was going to have Morgana turn out to be a much better-looking Lesbian version of Harvey Weinstein, running a casting couch in her office and forcing her nubile young charges to have sex with her … or else.

But the truth turns out to be more sinister than that: it seems Morgana was actually married to a man (though she “swung both ways,” as the saying goes), Jackson Netto (Blessing Mokgohloa), and was trying to conceive a child with him. Unfortunately, she didn’t or couldn’t do so in the normal biological fashion, so she hit on the idea of in vitro fertilization – and since her own eggs weren’t good enough even for that, she asked Christine to donate her eggs and allow them to be fertilized with Jackson’s sperm, then impregnated into her. All seemed to be going well enough until Christine got diagnosed with cancer, and for whatever reason she asked Morgana to return her donated eggs – and Morgana refused. The official verdict on Christine’s death was that she was run over accidentally and killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver, Joanne Argus (Alicia Gardiner), who pleaded guilty but confused the issue by insisting that she saw a shadowy figure push Christine into the path of her car just before Joanne hit her. But because she was drunk at the time she just saw a shadowy figure and couldn’t tell whether they were white, Black or something else; or whether they were male, female or something else. In the year since the incident Joanne had sobered up and started doing volunteer work at food banks, where Alexa runs into her handing out food donations in a public park.

Among Alexa’s leading suspects are Morgana and her ex-husband Jackson (they split up, apparently amicably, after five years together), but it turns out the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Zoe Swann (Mavournee Hazel), who was Morgana’s receptionist (do companies even have receptionists anymore? It seems every call is answered by voicemail these days!) and resented Christine for having aced her out of the promotion to Morgana’s personal assistant. Ironically, as Alexa and Kieran tell her when they arrest her for the murder at the end (well, Kieran does the actual arrest because Alexa isn’t a cop anymore), Christine already had quit working for Morgana the day before she was skilled and therefore Zoe hadn’t had to kill her to get the promotion she wanted and would have got anyway. My general criticism of My Life Is Murder so far has been the tendency of its writers to have Alexa bee-line for the most obvious suspect and prove him or her guilty almost straight off the box, but the immediately previous episode, “Can’t Stand the Heat,” had been a legitimately suspenseful whodunit and this time Claire Tonkin gave us at least three credible suspects and a reasonable plot resolution. There was also some nice by-play involving Alexa’s pet cat and the allergy her assistant, Aborigine (I guess) Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), has towards the little beast, who’s partial to hiding under Alexa’s couch and stubbornly resisting any efforts by the show’s human characters to get it out from under there and have it face the world.