OK, hear me out.
Murder She Wrote has been enjoying an ever increasing resurgence in popularity, to the point CBS was gonna launch a reboot a few years back, but this time with a young black woman. Old white ladies clutched their pearls, and got it canned.
Now consider, (second only to their Christmas movies) Hallmark makes a ton of mystery flicks. They even had to add a Hallmark Mystery Channel, that’s dominated by Murder She Wrote reruns. The audience of said channel has to be the same one that watches Svengoolie and Toon in with Me, (both big hits for MeTV); which the network shows Matlock and Perry Mason reruns all morning as it is. Toon in with Me’s popularity has spun off onto the MeTV weekend schedule with a three hour block of Popeye, Tom n Jerry, and Looney Tunes, another block of Flinstones on Sunday, and a 3 hour block Sunday nights on their sister channel MeTv+. They’ve taken to showing Charlie Brown movies around thanksgiving, and rerun classic WB holiday specials.
What’s all this mean? The older aged audience loves their mysteries and cartoons, essentially – Scooby Doo! That hugely popular show, lead to Hanna Barbera milking the concept in spades with countless format copies like Clue Club, The Funky Phantom, Goober and the Ghost Chasers, Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, Butch Cassidy, Devlin, Josie and the Pussycats,Jabber Jaw,etc.
How about we just combine the two into a new property? Murder She Wrote retooled as a Scooby type mash up! You could either make it Jessica as a retired woman, or my suggestion, make it her grand-niece; because Jessica had about 40 sub-relatives in the show’s original run anyway!
You take a dead beat niece, say Kristy McNichol’s character Jill Morton, who ran away to be in a rodeo (Showdown in Saskatchewan = s04 e20), and she had a baby out of wedlock. A good kid who ended up becoming a teacher like her great aunt (art teach/important later), but this girl was also extremely close to J.B., even caring for Jessica in her last years of life; to the point she legally changed her last name to Fletcher, and inherited Jessica’s fortune. Having retired herself (cause no one wants a young Murder She Wrote) this new Fletcher (Jennifer ?) has retired, and now roams the country in a micro school bus she’s converted to an RV, with her ginger cat, “Herring” (see what I did there?). She’s going from town to town, painting landscapes of happy trees (a Bob Ross tie in never hurts, and there could even be a mystery about a tv show paint instructor who gets killed by a falling easel?). She’s independently wealthy because of the inheritance, but of course ends up solving crimes like her relative. Here’s the twist … the ghost of J.B. Fletcher pops up time to time to point the grand-niece to hidden clues; so she’s still sticking her nose into stuff from beyond the grave! (Thanks to Purdy for that suggestion) You can make the plots a bit more mature and/or in line with Murder-She-Wrote/Matlock/Perry-Mason, or just straight up silly as Scooby. Can’t decide if it should be “Murder, She Sketched”, or “Murder, She Drew”, but I feel like “Murder, She Painted” doesn’t roll as well.
On top of all this, the design is already out there for WB/Hanna Barbera studios, as they can recycle the “Granny” from the old Harlem Globetrotter cartoon; which already kind of looked like Angela Lansbury. People won’t really remember her much, because they practically abandoned her before the series even got going, although she pops up now and then on the show.
Whaddah you think? Huh? Huh? Brilliant, I know.
