Angela Lansbury was an actress and singer who dazzled on film, TV, and theater over an incredible eight decades. The Academy Award recipient, who was made a Dame Commander by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014, can be rightly described as Dame Entertainment.
Her movie career stretched from Gaslight alongside Ingrid Bergman in 1944 to playing herself in the Knives Out sequel Glass Onion, set to release at the end of 2023. She was famous for her musical roles, on stage and screen, including Disney classics Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Beauty and the Beast.
But what many people will remember her for is her role as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running and highly influential crime drama Murder She Wrote.
Murder She Wrote
Murder She Wrote premiered on September 30, 1984, on CBS, and no one expected it would still be pulling in significant ratings 12 years later. The show amassed 12 seasons of 265 episodes. After those ended in 2003, Lansbury kept Fletcher sleuthing across four TV movies until 2007.
Fletcher wasn’t the first protagonist of a crime drama who inspired some wry jokes that her presence alone was enough to trigger a murder, and she should be on an FBI watch list at least. But the twist in Murder She Wrote was in the series’ punning name. Fletcher wasn’t a detective on the books like Columbo or consulting like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes — she was an amateur sleuth who also happened to be a well-connected best-selling writer of mysteries.
Fletcher was based in the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove for much of the series, a part of North America perhaps more famous to literary fans for Stephen King’s brand of horror. But Lansbury, as the retired English teacher with her feet on the ground, was an endlessly comforting presence as the show wracked up hundreds of deaths. She also enjoyed a far more friendly relationship with law enforcement around America, and occasionally the world, than many of her peers. Most, if not all, valued the author’s perceptive qualities. By later seasons, Fletcher had convinced enough of them she knew what she was talking about she’d started teaching criminology and spending more time in New York City.
The endlessly watchable Lansbury was a massive part of the show’s success, but she wasn’t always in mind to play the iconic writer. The producers developed the concept for Jean Stapleton. When the actress turned the project down, its future was in doubt until Lansbury — a recent big-screen Miss Marple — surprised them by not only being interested in a continuing TV series but seeing the potential of Jessica Fletcher. She was right: the sleuth became Lansbury’s best-loved and longest-running role.
A dominating force on weekend TV for most of the 1980s, at its peak, Jessica Fletcher’s crime solving pulled in more than 30 million viewers every week. Guest stars frequently returned, often in different roles, and the show even landed a high-profile crossover with Tom Selleck’s crime drama Magnum P.I. The Murder She Wrote franchise has branched out into a point-and-click video game and a spin-off set of novels that are still being published.
Meanwhile, the series is still popular on streaming worldwide, but where can you watch it online?
Where can you watch Murder She Wrote online?
If you’re itching to hear that catchy theme tune and hear Jessica Fletcher start every episode with “Tonight on Murder, She Wrote…” you’re in luck: you can stream all 12 seasons on Peacock right now with a subscription.
The show is also available through the Roku channel and on fuboTV and Philo with subscriptions to those networks.
All series of the show are also available on Amazon Prime. The Freevee service lets you watch Murder She Wrote for free as long as you don’t mind Jessica Fletcher’s investigations being interrupted by adverts.
Remember that with a run-time of about 48 minutes per episode, excluding adverts, you will have to set aside at least 212 hours to watch the whole run, or over eight days non-stop.
With Dame Angela on consistently brilliant form throughout, it’ll fly by.