My Life Is Murder: "Old School" (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 21) I watched the next episode in sequence of My Life Is Murder, a quite good crime show set in Melbourne, Australia and featuring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a veteran of the Melbourne Police Department who recently retired but is still involved with crime as a free-lance detective. She’s called in by her friend, Detective Inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), who’s still in the Melbourne PD to work cold cases as a private eye. This episode is called “Old School” and is about the supposedly accidental death of Imelda Beecroft (Jillian Murray), the universally beloved headmistress at the all-women school Alexa herself went to in her 1980’s girlhood. The show opens with a prologue set in 1985, when the young Alexa (Hattie Hook) and her best friend, Miranda Lee (Edwina Brodie), made a VHS tape with a camcorder (ya remember camcorders?) in which Alexa, as a prank, stole Beecroft’s car and promptly crashed it into a tree. (The crash wasn’t supposed to happen.) Then the film flashes forward to the 2019 present (2019 is when this quite interesting series started airing), when Alexa shows up at the school and starts nosing around. She greets the current Miranda Lee (Magda Szubanski), who turns out to be a grey-haired, heavy-set bitch who runs the place with all the sensitivity of a concentration camp. We actually get to see Miss Beecroft die – she’s in the room where the school keeps its rowing shells, pulling down posters from a student group demanding “All Access Now!” (The demand, it turns out, is to end the school’s policy of forbidding its boarding students to leave the campus grounds after school hours.) She reaches for an “All Access Now!” poster that’s been taped to a shell on the top row, and the entire rack collapses and crushes her.

Alexa finds sawed-off bolts that convince her that the rack was sabotaged and therefore it was intentional murder. There are plenty of suspects, mostly students, and Alexa concludes that since everybody loved Miss Beecroft she wasn’t the killer’s intended target. That would have been Ms. Lee, who as assistant headmistress under Beecroft set up an ultra-strict disciplinary system that kept the students in line by constantly threatening them with expulsion. One girl named Juliana Lloyd (Erana James) fires back, reminding Ms. Lee that her parents give so much money each year to keep the school going that she can’t be expelled without blowing a hole in the school’s budget. Ultimately the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] another student, Gemma Shaw (Alexandra Jensen), who like Alexa in her own school days was there as a scholarship student. That couldn’t help but remind me of George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his acid account of his days at a British “public school” (which means the opposite of what the term means in the U.S.; in Britain it means an ultra-exclusive private school) in which he recounted how the students on scholarships (including Orwell himself) were constantly being bullied by the ones whose parents could afford to pay their way there. Gemma was under the thumb of her mother, Kate Shaw (Julia Davis), who was aiming her for a political career. When Ms. Lee’s disciplinary system threatened to expel her, Gemma fought back by sabotaging the rowing room’s mounts so the frame would crush and kill Ms. Lee as she made her rounds in the rowing room after school hours – only it was the beloved Beecroft who went into the room, pulled down the “All Access Now!” poster, triggered the trap and died. Her motive was that an expulsion would not only throw her out of the school she and her mom had worked so hard to get her in, it would have destroyed her chances at a future career in politics.

While the very interesting character of Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), Alexa’s Indigenous sidekick, wasn’t much involved in this episode, Alexa’s friend George Stathopoulos (Alex Andreas), was. He’s shown getting involved with a girlfriend and promising her a half-share in the business if she helps finance his expansion – only Alexa warns him that he’s getting too involved both commercially and romantically with a woman he barely knows, and by the end of the episode their business partnership is off even though there’s a hint that they’re still intimate. There’s also a comic-relief scene in which Alexa, who’s already been in an ongoing feud with her landlady over the noise of her bread-making machine (though George thinks her bread is good enough he’s buying loaves of it from her and serving it in his coffeehouse), gets upbraided because she and George are drilling holes in a wooden beam. Alexa is doing this to test whether the bolt attaching the beam in the rowing room could have separated by accident or did it have to be sabotaged first, but when the landlady calls her on the noise Alexa asks George if he can drill more holes just to get her more annoyed!