Just started watching an Australian crime drama on Hulu called ‘Harrow’. It’s about a murder-solving mortician. He’s brilliant and kind of an asshole with a lot of personal and family problems, kind of like House M.D.
It got me thinking about how much TV loves to cast anybody but actual detectives as the ones who solve the murders. The ‘Harrow’ concept is of course not original-- there was ‘Quincy M.E.’ in the 70s.
Then there were the various incarnations of CSI-- instead of just gathering and analyzing evidence, the CSI guys would go visit and interview witnesses and people of interest, or actually interrogate suspects. At least the original CSI had an actual detective, Lt. Brass, but he never seemed to have too much to do-- he was more like an assistant to the CSI guys.
‘Bones’ had a murder-solving duo of an FBI agent and…an anthropologist?
There used to be an early 2000s crime drama called ‘Close to Home’ in which a team of prosecutors would seem to do their own detective work, including interviewing suspects. I admit I don’t know too much about the nuts and bolts of what prosecutors do, but I assumed they examined the evidence and suspect interviews from the detectives and made a determination to prosecute, not re-did the detectives’ job all over again.
Then there are all the amateur detectives who stumple across murders all the time. ‘Murder She Wrote’; ‘Monk’ probably falls into this category, although he’s at least a former detective who is hired on as a consultant. But he discovers so many random murders on his own that it’s joked about on the show.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of unlikely TV homicide-solving individuals or odd couples…
You should watch “The Cecil Hotel” on Netflix. It’s a good example of how the internet sleuths got it all wrong and the detectives figured it out. After the internet mob ruined peoples lives.
Agatha Christie was hardly the only, or even the first, to write popular stories featuring non-detective detectives. (For example, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown is earlier.)
Poirot was at least a retired police officer. The great granddaddy of all fictional detectives, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, was a complete amateur, as was Sherlock Holmes. There have been non-professional mystery solvers as long as there has been mystery fiction.
The Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel has a number of series of “cozy mystery” movies, nearly all of which feature amateur detectives (and most of them based on novel series), including an antique store owner, a chef, a baker, a librarian, a TV chef, a crossword-puzzle writer, a podcast host, etc.
Psych is another good example and I think that one gets at the hear of “why” too: Spencer’s dad was a detective, and he always wanted his son to be a defective, but unlike his straight laced dad Shawn doesn’t care for “procedure” or “rules”. So he pretends to be a psychic in order to run his investigations however he pleases, then put on a little magic show to guide the cops to the evidence so they can “discover” it themselves, avoiding pesky things like “due process” or “probable cause”.
There’s even one episode where his shenanigans get caught on tape leading to all the evidence he provided being tossed out in court.
I think that’s why TV shows avoid having the actual professionals doing the investigating. It makes for a better story if your plucky hero ignores police procedure until he’s got enough evidence to turn over to the cops, and the boring procedural stuff is left for after the episode.
I haven’t seen the show, but the descriptions I found say that Harrow is a forensic pathologist, not a mortician. A mortician is a funeral director or undertaker. They prepare a body for burial or cremation. In the ordinary course of their profession, they would not be involved in criminal investigations. But a forensic pathologist would often be involved in investigations. Quincy worked alongside a detective named Frank Monahan, who appeared in almost every episode. The show stretched the truth a bit by having Quincy do most of the investigative work than would normally be the case. I don’t think there is anything absurd about a crime show centered on a forensic pathologist. It’s not the same as detectives whose day jobs are as novelists, busybodies, members of the aristocracy, priests, high school students, or fake psychics, none of whom have any business investigating crime.
Good example and good analysis of why TV shows like to use anything but boring old detectives as the solvers of murders.
True, I did mis-speak on the profession of the Harrow character, I meant to say he was a forensic pathologist, and yes, they are involved in murder investigations. But like real CSIs they have their role to play gathering evidence, not doing actual detective work. In the premiere episode of ‘Harrow’ he investigates the death of a woman who had been ruled ‘case closed’ as a suicide but the father insisted it was murder. Harrow not only examined the body (again, after the case had been closed) he examined the police evidence, went to the crime scene and even did a couple ambush-style interviews of the ex-boyfriend. Result:
Harrow had noticed the victim’s tooth was recently chipped before she died. Police photos of ex-boyfriend right afterward showed a band-aid on a knuckle. Harrow determines the boyfriend had forcibly drugged her and poured booze down her throat in order to make it look like an overdose, chipping her tooth and getting it embedded in his knuckle. Harrow confronts the boyfriend and breaks his finger, forcing an x-ray which reveals the victim’s tooth fragment still embedded in the knuckle.
Pretty much everything involving the police or police work is distorted at best and totally falsified at worst by Hollywood. If you want to know anything about being a policeman or about police work, don’t watch cop shows or movies.
Bored to Death was about a Brooklyn author who starts a sideline as a private detective. (In one episode, a character offhandedly mentions Paul Auster, who used a similar premise in “City of Glass.”)
Jessica Fletcher was dropping bodies right and left and then gaslighting innocent victims into confessing to a crime she totally manufactured. It is shocking nobody looked at the murder rate in her vicinity and put it all together because the statistics alone make the truth self-evident.
There have been plenty of American television shows over the years featuring police detectives solving criminal cases.
Colombo
Law & Order
McCloud
McMillan and Wife
Dragnet
Barney Miller
Hawaii Five-Oh
The Mod Squad
NYPD Blue
Life
NCIS
Brooklyn 99
Those are just the shows I can think of off the top of my head. Though, yeah, you’re right that they certainly like to make crime procedural shows and put someone besides an official detective in the detective role.
I think the narrative hook here is that these amateur crime solvers are free to pick and choose the murders they work on. So they can ignore all of the routine murder investigations which they - and the viewers - would find boring. These investigations get handled by the professional police detectives. The amateur crime solvers only pick the investigations where there’s an interesting mystery to be solved. Which, breaking the fourth wall, are the kinds of investigations that the audience would rather watch.
