Crimes against television

I’m a psychology student, so Sigmund Freud and I are well acquainted. Freud is associated with dream analysis, the Freudian Slip and having a crush on your parents. The last thing most of us associate Ol’ Freudy with is detective work. However, a new show- Freud: The Secret Casebook– will show what it would be like if Freud alternated penis envy antics with crime solving. Yes, really.

Psychiatrist, detective or male model?

Essentially they’ve picked a random historical figure and thrown murders at him. I predict the next crime procedural will see the Queen and Winston Churchill hunting murderers in a WW2 era buddy cop show.

The idea is ridiculous yet it has already gone in to casting. Crime shows are amongst the most contrived areas of television. While the nature of the crimes themselves rarely changes, each new programme relies on increasingly strange premises to stay fresh.

My favourite conventions is the “amateur sleuth.” Someone with no credentials winds up at the scene of a murder and miraculously solves the crime. A perfect example is Murder, She Wrote. Despite my love for Jessica Fletcher, the character is just a mystery novel writer who happens to be the most unlucky person on the planet. Every friend of Jessica’s ends up dead or accused of murder. Her hometown has a murder rate 86 times higher than the most murderous city in the real world. Yet we accept the idea that people still want to be around the death magnet, just as we accept that a respected detective would let a random old woman wonder in and out of a crime scene.

Jessica isn’t the worst amateur sleuth. At least she has some knowledge and a friendship with the town’s law enforcement. A far more ridiculous idea is Rosemary and Thyme. For the uninitiated, it follows two gardeners called Rosemary and Thyme who regularly wind up stumbling upon murder scenes while planting gardenias. They then solve the crime without ever being arrested for trespassing or obstructing justice. Rosemary and Thyme got 3 seasons before people realised any civilian who discovered over 20 crime scenes would be far too traumatised to prune rose bushes. You can watch all the episodes here. Thank me later.

One of the most popular trends in crime shows is the “disability superpower.” The detective’s disability somehow makes them exceptional detectives. Some examples make sense: In Sue Thomas F.B.Eye, deaf Sue reads the lips of suspects; in Unforgettable, Carrie has a detailed memory for everything she’s ever seen (except the murder of her sister, dun dun duuuun). Then there are some shows which push the boundaries a little too far such as Perception, a show about a schizophrenic neuroscientist whose hallucinations help him solve crime. My lecturers failed to mention this pleasant side to schizophrenia when we studied mental illness.

Whether the new Freud show will crash and burn remains to be seen, but it will certainly slot in nicely with the bizarre history of crime shows. As much as it confuses and annoys us, the world of crime has hooked audiences for decades with everyman characters and a scope so outlandish that no idea is off limits. While the shows may seem stupid, you have to admire their creativity.

Images courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org