Every episode of Murder, She Wrote began, before the theme song and title credit, with some clips from the upcoming episode. A moment into these clips, Angela Lansbury would say, “Tonight, on Murder, She Wrote.” The clips invariably made the episode seem more exciting than it was, and frequently misdirected as to the villain and just as often made the episode seem like it was a very different episode.

I find it curious that this was a part of every episode. It was by no means standard on TV shows of the time. Morever, Murder, She Wrote episodes were packed very full so it’s not like they needed to pad the episode out.

I suspect that the main reason for the clipjob of the episode we’re about to watch is that Murder, She Wrote normally starts out a bit slow. It’s quite uncommon to have a body in the first sixty seconds and only about half of the episodes have a body by fifteen minutes in. This isn’t a problem for regular viewers, since we know what we’re getting into and in any event murder mysteries are meant to be considered, not action-packed. Murder, She Wrote was distributed via broadcast (and later cable) television, however, which had some peculiar quirks to it, relative to how people watch TV shows now.

In particular, if one changed the channel something else would be instantly on. This differs from modern streaming in that no choice is necessary prior to viewing something else; one simply would start seeing a different show and could evaluate without any decision-paralysis whether it was better. If one is watching a show on a streaming service, or via DVDs, or what-have-you, switching from the current show involves some amount of time spent evaluating options while not watching anything, and the new things may not be a replacement of the same length. This meant if you didn’t grab someone, they might easily decide to change the channel to see if something better was on.

This phenomenon was exacerbated by the way one got a decent fraction of one’s viewership: they were watching whatever was on in the timeslot before you. Of the ones who didn’t come in this way, some decent fraction had been watching something else and flipped channels to see what else was on. They might not even be intending to check out the channel on which your show is playing, so you have only a moment or two to grab them before they follow their original intention and flip away.

The longer one watches this on-demand, and thus intentionally, the stranger this seems. I stopped watching linear TV about twenty years ago. In college I would catch Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the shared TV in the dorm lounge, but when I moved into my own apartment for grad school not paying for cable TV was a very easy savings and I was not tempted to get an antenna for broadcast TV, either. And I’ve never been tempted to get TV service since then, either, despite the internet company all but throwing it in for free with my internet service.

(Incidentally, I’ll never forget the look of horror on my oldest son’s face when I explained to him how broadcast TV worked, where if you missed it when it broadcast you simply didn’t get to see it until re-run season.)

I have no idea if “Tonight, on Murder, She Wrote” served its intended purpose. If you had any experience of the show you know that at best it was irrelevant to the episode and most of the time it was misleading; thus it was just annoying. On the plus side, though I only realized it later in life, you didn’t need to bother avoiding it because it never contained any spoilers. It’s curious to see it now, watching the episodes on DVD. It’s an odd connection to when I was a child and watched it over broadcast (we didn’t have cable back then), in spite of it being a bad memory.

It’s curious how one can become nostalgic for things one didn’t like; perhaps it is in some way connected to the improved powers of enjoyment one gains as one ages, providing one doesn’t waste the time.