Murdoch Mysteries: Season 1 Blu-ray delivers great video and solid audio in this excellent Blu-ray release
Set in 1895 Toronto, Murdoch Mysteries explores the intriguing world of William Murdoch, a handsome young detective using radical forensic techniques including fingerprinting and trace evidence, to solve some of the city's most gruesome murders. Though his unconventional approach elicits ridicule from fellow officers and scepticism from his boss, Inspector Brackenreid, Murdoch is often the only one who can crack the case.
Acorn Media is playing catch-up again, but it's a small gap to close. The unique Canadian police
drama, Murdoch Mysteries—set in the late 19th Century and featuring a soft-spoken but resolute
police detective who invents modern forensics as he goes along—made its Blu-ray debut in 2011
with Season
3, after two seasons had already appeared on DVD. Acorn is now returning to the
beginning and issuing Season 1 on Blu-ray, even as it prepares to release Season 4 on Blu-ray
and DVD simultaneously later this year. (Season 5 is currently airing in Canada, and Season 6 is
planned for 2013, though on a different network.)
Murdoch Mysteries is based on a series of crime novels by Maureen Jennings, who continues to
act as an advisor to the TV show. It was Jennings who conceived of Det. William Murdoch as a
kind of Sherlock Holmes with a badge. (Holmes is one of Murdoch's heroes.) Still, despite
Murdoch's official status, he remains an outsider and eccentric in the Toronto constabulary of the
1890s. For one thing, Murdoch is a Catholic in an otherwise intensely Protestant city; he crosses
himself whenever he first encounters a murder victim. Then there's Murdoch's preference for
heavy scientific tomes on obscure subjects as light reading, and his habit of answering simple
questions at length, parsing his responses with the precision one might expect from a bright
student taught by Jesuit priests. A man like Murdoch would never have made detective if his
strange methods didn't so often produce results.
Three TV movies, based directly on Jennings' novels, aired in 2004-2005. These were successful
enough to inspire a weekly series with original stories (and an entirely new cast). The first season
of thirteen episodes aired from January 24 through April 17, 2008, and further seasons have
followed annually. The show has been shown in the U.S. on PBS and in countries around the world
from France to Thailand.
Tesla and Murdoch
Like many of its urban counterparts in the U.S., the Toronto of the 1890s had advanced far
beyond a frontier town, but it was still a work in progress with a bustling sense of activity and
potential. It was also a melting pot, and some of that diversity is reflected in Murdoch
Mysteries' regular cast. Det. Murdoch (Yannick Bisson), reserved and almost courtly, relocated to
Toronto from Eastern Canada after spending a few years working as a logger. Murdoch's family
background is explored during an episode when his father, whom he hasn't seen since he was a
boy, unexpectedly appears in Toronto. (To avoid spoilers, I'm not identifying the episode.)
Murdoch's usual sidekick is Constable George Crabtree (Jonny Harris), who is originally from
Newfoundland. Crabtree admires Murdoch but frequently can't follow his reasoning. He
nevertheless makes himself indispensable by paying close attention and following through on
Murdoch's instructions. Crabtree also provides much of the comic relief, and Harris plays the
part to perfection.
Their boss is Inspector Brackenreid (Thomas Craig), a former English soldier whose thick
Yorkshire accent hasn't been dulled by his years in Canada. Nor has his temper been cooled,
especially when Murdoch insists on complicating what appears to be an open-and-shut case with
a lot of questions about "loose ends". With his hard drinking and his impatient style, Brackenreid
joins a line of tough, pragmatic police officials whose most famous representative is Life on
Mars's DCI Gene Hunt.
The final regular cast member is a rare breed for the period, a female coroner, Dr. Julia Ogden
(Hélène Joy). Daughter of a socially prominent Toronto family, the doctor chose not to
follow the usual path of tea parties and a suitable marriage, opting instead for a career in medicine
as a single woman. All of this makes Dr. Ogden as much an oddball as Murdoch, and the two are
clearly meant for each other, even though significant factors conspire to keep them apart. It
should tell you something about the wit and comedic style of Murdoch Mysteries that many
of its most achingly romantic encounters occur in Dr. Ogden's antiseptically white examining room
over the bloody viscera of some unfortunate murder victim.
The season's opening episode, "Power", launches the series with a concentrated dose of its
typical elements. It revolves around a real event in technological history: the shift from direct
current (DC) to alternating current (AC). As with all such changes, significant profits rested on
the outcome, and the proponents of DC, who included Thomas Edison, arranged public
demonstrations intended to highlight the risks of AC to the public by electrocuting small animals.
At one such demonstration in Toronto, an accident occurs, and a person is electrocuted, but
Murdoch, who has been following the controversy with interest, determines that the equipment
was tampered with. Suspicion initially falls on Nikola Tesla (Dmitry Chepovetsky), the famous
Serbian-American developer of AC, who was formerly Edison's colleague and is now his rival,
but Murdoch quickly discovers other elements at play. Indeed, Tesla's help proves essential to
solving the case.
The scenes between Tesla, the professional scientist, and Murdoch, the devoted amateur, are
slyly written to the contemporary viewer's knowledge of what's to come. (The two men conceive
the idea of television in about fifteen seconds, down to the name itself.) These neatly constructed
intersections with actual history are a big part of the show's appeal. Another historical figure who
appears several times in Season 1 is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Geraint Wyn Davies), who, at least
according to the show's writers, got the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles from Inspector
Brackenreid.
Real issues as well as real people make their presence felt. As with all the best historical fiction,
the past serves as a storyteller's filter through which to view the present. In episode 2, "The
Knockdown", a professional boxer is found dead, shot at close range, with his wife standing over
him holding the gun. For Brackenreid the case is obvious, but Murdoch points out that the wife's
clothing has no blood splatter consistent with a close range entry wound. After proving his point
with a demonstration worthy of Dexter Morgan (it involves a freshly killed pig from the butcher),
Murdoch focuses on the fighter's recent activities. An African-American, he had just knocked
out the local favorite, who is white and didn't take the loss well. Neither did the local
audience.
The case in episode 5, "'Til Death Do Us Part", causes Murdoch much inner turmoil. A groom is
killed in the church on his wedding day, and the investigation reveals that he may have led a
secret and guarded life as a homosexual (the term was just then coming into use). Murdoch finds
himself struggling to remain objective in the face of a phenomenon condemned by everything in
his Catholic upbringing, and he is even more conflicted when he discovers that the victim's
pastor may have known his true nature.
Episode 10, "Child's Play", touches on the perennial issue of proper oversight when poor or
orphaned children are placed in foster care. Episode 11, "Bad Medicine", foreshadows the
medical profession's many 20th Century missteps in valuing scientific progress over the welfare
of individual patients. Episode 8, "Still Waters", turns on class conflict between rich and poor
(it also features Murdoch's attempt to create a lie detector). And Episode 12, "The Prince and the
Rebel", which was clearly inspired by Patriot Games, uses the occasion of a state visit by
Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Alfred (Chad Connell), to examine the then-current state of the
"Irish problem", which wouldn't be resolved for over 100 years. Since the name "Murdoch" is Irish, the
case becomes particularly personal for the usually detached detective.
But perhaps the season's wittiest episode is its conclusion, entitled "The Annoying Red Planet",
in which a recluse (Robert Racki) who believed Martians were after him is found in a tree with
his neck broken, and no one, not even Murdoch, can explain how he got there, since there are no
footprints or other traces of human agency. Crop circles, eviscerated cattle, UFOs and other
classic signs of alien presence continue to appear, and all the while Murdoch plays the skeptical
Scully, proposing rational explanations, while Crabtree and Dr. Ogden make it clear that they
want to believe. That the Canadian equivalent of an X-file is involved is confirmed when an
order comes down from the highest level of Her Majesty's government. A vast conspiracy is
indeed at work. Pay close attention, and you'll catch a few familiar references.
Murdoch Mysteries is shot on hi-def video, and the style is deliberately bright and slightly
overlit to create the opposite effect of a sepia-toned, period style. Acorn Media's 1080p, AVC-encoded
Blu-ray image is consistently clean, clear and well-detailed, so much so that you can routinely
pick out individual fibres in clothing, pores in faces and anachronistic product markings in the
production design (a point made repeatedly in the commentary on episode 1). Blacks are solid
and deep (for a TV show), and degrees of black are well-differentiated, so that scenes with
darkened areas (e.g., Tesla's lab) exhibit good shadow detail.
The only criticism, and it's a minor one, is an occasional occurrence of video noise. This is
probably a leftover from digital post-processing, and it's generally fleeting, but it does pop up
from time to time.
It wasn't until I'd watched about half of season 1 that I noticed its 2.0 audio track wasn't the
PCM 2.0 listed on the disc jacket. Murdoch Mysteries is shown in stereo surround, and the
Blu-ray release of Season 3 had PCM 2.0 sound, but for some reason Season 1 has DD 2.0 at 256
kbps (which, at least, is an improvement over the anemic 192 kbps usually found on DVD). That
the lossy track didn't call attention to itself before then is an indication of how well it does its
job, reproducing dialogue and effects clearly and blending them effectively with the distinctive
score by Robert Carli.
Commentary on Episode 1 by Executive Producer Cal Coons, Actors Yannick
Bisson and Jonny Harris and Production Designer Sandra Kybartas (disc 1): Coons,
who is the showrunner, leads a lively and informative discussion that provides an
intriguing look inside the process of creating a "pre-modern" police procedural. For
example, Coons and Kybartas note that many of the instruments and inventions used by
Murdoch and Nikola Tesla are authentic and therefore worn with age, whereas
realistically they should look new. But when they tried to incorporate objects with fresh
wood and shiny metal, it just didn't look right. Also of note is that this episode, "Power",
which works so effectively as a pilot, was originally conceived to fall much later in the
season.
Character Biographies (disc 3): Brief summaries of the background of the four
main characters. These don't contain anything beyond what one learns from the episodes.
Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery (disc 3) (HD, 1080p; various): Fourteen photos
with helpful captions identifying those pictured.
Additional Trailers: At startup, disc 1 plays trailers for Acorn Media, Going Postal and
Bonekickers.
These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are not otherwise available once the disc
loads.
I grew up on police procedurals, going all the way back to the original Dragnet, and they've
never lost their attraction. But I don't find every variation of the genre equally gripping, and the
technocratic version pioneered by CSI doesn't appeal. Murdoch Mysteries is the
perfect antidote, because it catches forensic science in its infancy, when it was still too primitive
and undeveloped to function without the aid of traditional policework. Det. Murdoch may be a sleuth
devoted to scientific method, but he still appreciates the value of talking to people and listening
carefully to what they have to say. Highly recommended.
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