On the couch: Leader streaming reviews

Kick back and relax with these fun murder mystery TV shows

Watch cases get solved in island paradise, Roaring Twenties Australia, early 1990s NYC

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It’s an amusing paradox that few forms of entertainment are as effective at distracting audiences from their real-life troubles as a murder mystery story, whether it’s an Agatha Christie novel or a true-crime documentary.

Television helps make the genre especially light and breezy, to the point that Angela Lansbury’s “Murder, She Wrote” was considered the epitome of family-friendly Sunday-night TV viewing for a dozen years.

What follows are a few of my favorite murder mystery TV shows that are available for binge-viewing online, but as LeVar Burton used to say on “Reading Rainbow,” you don’t have to take my word for it, because they’re also much-beloved by my parents, Warren and Linda, whenever they settle in for a quiet night at their Cape George home.

 

4. The Exotic Eye-Candy — “Death in Paradise”

The fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie would be an ideal getaway, if not for boasting a murder rate to rival a number of big cities on the mainland.

Because the island is a British overseas territory, its local police force consists of a lead detective inspector imported from the UK, backed up by a team of native constables.

In nine seasons, the cast has gone through four detective inspectors and a veritable revolving door of local officers, but even when the characters change, the roles remain rigidly the same.

Our fish-out-of-water British protagonist copes with the unfamiliar rhythms of island life, and his loyal crew provides comic relief and minor character arcs of their own, with most of their stories being variants of locked-room mysteries and our clever detective bringing together the closed circle of suspects to tell them all whodunnit in the final minutes of the episode.

Richard Poole (Ben Miller) was the extremely buttoned-down DI who led the ensemble in its first two seasons, and Jack Mooney (Ardal O’Hanlon) has been the gregarious Irish detective since the final few episodes of season six, but my mom most adored the awkward, boyish, earnestly romantic Humphrey Goodman, played by Kris Marshall.

The plots are admittedly lightweight, but the gorgeous shooting locations in the Guadeloupe archipelago make for a great mental vacation destination, especially when we’re all bunkering down in our homes.

Watch “Death in Paradise” on Amazon Prime or BritBox.

 

3. The Opulent Period Piece — “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”

Everything exotic about “Death in Paradise” is amplified in “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries,” which is set in 1920s Melbourne, Australia, so not only can you bask in the novelty of far-off lands, but you can also revel in hand-me-down nostalgia for the Prohibition era, with its lavish art deco fashions and architecture.

That’s before we even get to the character of Miss Phryne Fisher herself, a sassy flapper aristocrat and private detective whose bohemian ethos allows her to make connections with members of all the stratified social classes.

Although Miss Fisher is only 28 years old in the source novels by Kerry Greenwood, she was ably portrayed by Essie Davis when she was in her early 40s, and while Miss Fisher is a witty, independent woman with no shortage of lovers, either in the novels or onscreen, the TV series creates a smoldering chemistry between Davis and Nathan Page, who plays Detective Inspector Jack Robinson, who’s not nearly so reluctant to play the Lestrade to her Holmes as he might pretend.

Not only are Davis and Page magnetic in their roles, and well-supported by an endearing cast that includes Tammy MacIntosh as Dr. Elizabeth “Mac” Macmillan, Miss Fisher’s sharp-dressed close friend who works at a women’s hospital in Melbourne, but the stories make adept use of Australia’s fascinating history, while wrapping themselves up in period-appropriate costumes and fixations with contemporary subjects such as archaeological finds from Egypt.

Watch “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” on Amazon Prime or Acorn TV.

 

2. The Grim-and-Gritty Police Procedural — “Law & Order,” the first five seasons

Television producer Dick Wolf took an already solid meat-and-potatoes concept, with the first “Law & Order” show and splintered it into a Marvel Cinematic Universe worth of spin-offs, from the successes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” to the damp squibs of “Law & Order: Trial by Jury,” “Law & Order: LA” and “Law & Order: True Crime.”

More recently, old-school “Special Victims Unit” fans were thrilled to hear Wolf’s recent announcement that rageaholic cop Elliot Stabler from “SVU,” played by Christopher Meloni, will soon return in his own new “Law & Order” show.

And yet, for as much as I love Wolf’s oeuvre, something was lost when Classic Coke “Law & Order” shifted its focus away from its ripped-from-the-headlines cases and began to linger more on the personal lives of its cops and prosecutors, in no small part because seeing how those characters responded to the legal issues raised by their cases revealed far more about their characters than any weepy confessionals about their pasts ever could.

Go back and rewatch the original series from the start, with its jazzy Mike Post background music and its cinéma vérité style of cinematography, and you’ll discover a very different, much more grounded crime drama than you might remember, one that evokes the unique feel of New York City during its hangover years of recovery from the excesses of the 1980s.

Chris Noth radiated lived-in, street-level authenticity as Detective Mike Logan. Jill Hennessy was engaging and fierce as hell as Assistant District Attorney Claire Kincaid (“There’s nothing latent about my feminism”). Jerry Orbach made Detective Lennie Briscoe feel like every wryly jocular, world-weary uncle you’d ever known.

And while Michael Moriarty brought a deceptively soft-spoken righteousness to the table as Executive Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, it was his successor in the office, Sam Waterston as Jack McCoy, whose veteran acting talents were finally fully unleashed. When Waterston’s McCoy raised his voice, and his thick black eyebrows started wiggling in the air like angry, gravity-defying caterpillars, you knew that whichever fool he was bellowing at had unleashed the fury of Hades itself.

Watch “Law & Order” on Amazon Prime or NBC’s Peacock app.

 

1. The Gold Standard of Sleuths — “Columbo”

As long as there are detective dramas, there will always be debates about which fictional detective is the greatest.

Let me save you the trouble. You’re all wrong, it’s Columbo.

What’s funny about “Columbo” is that, in nearly every episode, the real stars of the show are the murderers, whom we witness in the act of planning and committing their crimes well before the police are even called to show up, and the hunched-over, rumpled detective who eventually does arrive is always several steps behind not only the killer, but also the audience.

Lt. Columbo (his first name is never spoken aloud, but his IDs list it as “Frank”) is as far removed from Jack Webb’s squared-away Joe Friday on “Dragnet” as one could get. He’s a mess. His clothes, including his trademark trench coat, have obviously never seen an iron. His car, a 1959 Peugeot convertible, is literally falling apart.

Worse yet, Columbo appears socially oblivious to the point of rudeness, in spite of his attempts at being polite. He traipses over boundaries, smudging them with shuffle-steps. He lapses into lengthy detours in his train of thought. And when he’s not meandering, he’s easily distracted, getting derailed by how some detail of the case reminds him of his wife, or some errands he’d meant to do that day.

And it’s all authentic—Columbo is well-suited to his name of “Frank”—and yet, at the same time, it’s all an act. It’s a trap. In almost every case, the killer has the advantages of a formidable intelligence and considerable resources to cover up their tracks, and in their dismissive arrogance in dealing with the seemingly absent-minded flatfoot who keeps pestering and nagging at them, always circling back to ask “just one more thing,” they eventually let slip with some minor admission that ultimately, irrevocably damns them.

Columbo might have one glass eye, but nothing gets past him, and whether that episode’s guest-murderer is Patrick McGoohan, Jack Cassidy, Robert Culp, George Hamilton or even William Shatner (all of whom played different killers on multiple episodes of “Columbo”), there’s nothing quite so satisfying as seeing an arrogant, cold-blooded killer get his comeuppance from an unassuming gumshoe you can tell was never first in his class.

Watch full episodes of “Columbo” for free on YouTube.