I’m thinking of going back to the beginning with my reviews of Murder, She Wrote. When I started writing the reviews I was doing it in a very haphazard way, just picking out ones that struck me fancy. Then, starting with an episode that was towards the last quarter of the fourth season, I started doing them in order, where I would end each review with what “next week’s” episode would be. I like this format as it captures a bit of the feel of having watched them back in the day, and also forces me to review the episodes which aren’t as good, which I think has value since the exercise is largely about learning from a great show and analyzing mistakes is valuable, if not as valuable as analyzing what was done well.

While I like this format, it does feel a bit funny to start it partway through season 4. So I’m considering going back to season 1 and doing the episodes in order from there. (Where I come up to episodes I already reviewed I’m just going to edit them into the appropriate format with the link to the previous one at the top and the link to the next one at the bottom.) I do plan to skip the pilot episode, The Murder of Sherlock Holmes, for two reasons:

1. At an hour and a half long, it would be a ton of work.
2. It’s a pilot episode and like most pilot episodes it’s fairly different from the main series.

It’s that second one that makes me put so much weight on the first point; a lot of extra work would be worth it if there was a lot more to get out of it. But analyzing a pilot will, generally, not help in understand a show because there are always so many changes. For example, in the pilot Jessica is shocked by encountering murder for real, even though it’s someone she didn’t know, and was deeply cut up about figuring out who the murderer was, despite barely having known him (admittedly, there was a bit of a romantic sub-plot between them). That would have been hard to stomach on a regular basis and so it was, wisely, dropped. (Or at least was dropped for most of the episodes. The ones that took it up again tended to suffer for it, the exception I can think of being When Thieves Fall Out.)

It’s going to be a few days before I start on the next review, so if anyone has any thoughts to share on this, I’d be grateful for them.