Ellery Queen is one of my favorite TV series of all time. Why, you ask? What appeal could there possibly be in a show set in the 40's but made in the 70's, full of 40's characters inexplicably sporting wide collars and bellbottom pants? It's not in the stories or the acting or any of that, though all elements mesh very well, but is instead in the fact that Ellery Queen was the first (To my knowledge) interactive TV. That is to say, you have to work your brain while watching it, and the best enjoyment doesn't come from sitting slack-jawed and passive while the show washes over you, but rather from watching it with a like-minded friend or spouse and working the mysteries yourselves.
You see, the hook is this - Unlike most other mystery shows where you're shown the killer, or the hero solves the problem using deux ex machina, Ellery Queen puts everything in front of you except the identity of the culprit. Ellery investigates, and you get the clues as Ellery encounters them. You're on an even footing with the TV detective until that magic point sometime around the 35-40 minute mark when Ellery breaks the fourth wall and turns to you, the audience, with his classic, "And suddenly I knew it - I knew who the killer was! The clues were right there all along. Did you get it? Did you think it was the gardener too? Or was that too obvious? Let's see how you did."... and then we're off to the suspect roundup and finish, when Ellery lays out the evidence and fingers the bad guy.
This works fantastically well on DVD, far better than it ever did on network TV thanks to the wonder of the pause button. Watch this with a good friend and you're in for an hour of fun debate. Watch. Pause. "Where did that guy just go? How did he have a key to that door?" Watch. Pause. "And look, he just walked past that door a few minutes later and it's standing open." It goes like that. You watch every interaction and every conversation, always on the lookout for those crucial slips that will point you to the murderer. Emily and I have a grand time of this, going back and forth with a hundred crazy theories per episode. And while the shows themselves are mellow and leisurely in pace, the tension mounts like mad in the living room as you're all watching the clock tick down towards that inevitable moment when Ellery will do his "Talk to the audience" schtick and you'll know there are no more clues forthcoming. That's the worst of it, when you're back and forth on evidence and have NO idea who the killer was and seem to have missed everything, and you're literally two minutes away from Ellery's big speech.
10/10 from me.
Oh, and by the way... Did I even mention the excellent theme by none other than Elmer Bernstein? Here's a typical intro, opening with the mystery layout and flowing into the marvelous opening music:
I used to watch this show as a kid.
ReplyDeleteI blame the language barrier for the fact that i never managed to get the culprit even once.
I really can't imagine trying to follow something like this in a second language. It's so dependent on really subtle and sneaky clues. When I'm listening to French, I do good to follow the most blatant meaning of the discussion, and I'm hopeless for catching subtext. Emily and I have a pretty good record with Ellery, and generally solve about 2 out of 3, though every once in a while they will hit us with a ringer based on something we didn't know (Like the number of digits of a telephone number in the 40's). I'm tempted to send this set to Twitch & FPN to play together with, but they'd probably think it was too old and boring.
ReplyDelete