Murder, she... jabbed

Welcome, entertained reader, as this week we serve up a no-holds-barred exposé of America's grittiest, cinéma vérité-esque televisual experience: I am of course talking about the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries channel!

And just for a change, I'm pulling your leg: Hallmark Movies and Mysteries is warm and fluffy enough that it makes Midsomer Murders look like Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes. That's really not unusual - the subtle, nuanced, ambiguous texture of something like Breaking Bad is still very much the exception rather than the rule here in the US, and frankly there's nothing on network television that would upset Mary Whitehouse. But Hallmark Movies and Mysteries takes the fluff to new levels.

In designing the channel, they appear to have mapped out a particular demographic, and crafted their stories such that they hit that grouping fairly and squarely. They've done that by establishing a formula which worships at the altar of 80s fluff-fest Murder She Wrote (coincidentally set in Maine, but filmed here in California, because, well, weather I guess), with a twist to make it fit the folks they're trying to snare even better. The formula goes something like:

• Protagonist of the show should be an effortlessly attractive, well-dressed white woman in her 40s. She should be spirited and independent-minded, and have at least one handsome, appropriately-aged intelligent-but-sensitive hunky male in tow.

• Her mother might also be hanging around. If so, she's an attainably-glamorous late-60s type that is still ready for some sleuthing action.

• Our heroine should have a pleasant but fundamentally unchallenging career in some kind of activity that our target demographic identifies with, and which ideally provides some sort of community or public profile.

• She lives in a huge, beautifully-designed house. The fact that owning or creating such a place is not possible on the proceeds of the unchallenging career will never be explained.

• It should be set somewhere picturesque, ideally with a quaint, small-town feel. Lighthouses, mountains, clapperboard houses are all good additions. Houses are painted baby blue, of course.

Now this all sounds pretty unbelievable, but let me tell you that there is literally a show called Murder, She Baked. Of course, in this our heroine owns a bakery - how quaint! - and it's set in the small town of Lake Eden, Minnesota. Initially in conflict with the local police detective, they soon strike up a romance.

Then you've got the Crossword Mysteries, which in a dark twist (or as dark as the twists to this formula get), is set in New York City. In this our protagonist is a crossword puzzle editor, with such plausible storylines as taking part in a crossword puzzle solving contest head-to-head with a supercomputer.

Perhaps most difficult to swallow are the Flower Shop Mysteries, where none other than Brooke Shields finds herself installed as a small-town florist. Yes, Brooke Shields. That Brooke Shields. Not only that, but she inexplicably owns a vintage Corvette and then a classic 80s Mercedes SLC in this one (my guess is the demographic research went a bit wrong there, although I like the hat-tip to spiritual predecessor Hart to Hart in the Merc).

But the classic, the archetype, the epitome of this template are the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries, where our local librarian Aurora somehow gets dragged into solving real-life murders more often than she'd like. This even stars the great Marilu Henner of Taxi fame as Aurora's mother. Aurora's house is particularly impressive in this one, and if she can afford that on a US librarian's salary then frankly I'm persuading Helen to get back between the book stacks very soon so I can retire!

Put it all together and you've just got something hilariously bad, 24 hours a day. But there's clearly a big market for this: the shows are beautifully made and shot, with high production values and plenty of money being thrown around. I'm not sure if they think their audience is daft enough to have failed to spot the formula, or whether they know it works so they might as well just keep repeating it, but it doesn't seem like a lot of effort is putting into dreaming these things up.

Back in the real world, we're visiting the 49ers stadium tomorrow (or the car park, anyway), to get our first dose of the COVID vaccine:

It now seems relatively easy to get a vaccination appointment here, which is great. We're looking forward to it!

[And just to reference our previous printer diatribe: we had two of these to print, one for me, one for Helen. Mine printed fine first time, Helen's... well let's just say it took two goes. So a 66% success rate on printing documents on this particular day]