TV on DVD Buzz

This week’s TV on DVD Season I am going through and doing wrap ups of is the double sided 3 disc Murder, She Wrote Season 1 set. I will be posting about one disc each day until this Saturday. This is the wrap up of Side B of Disc 1.

“Hooray for Homicide” - Jessica receives a call from a friend to tell her about them talking about her movie on television. She turns it on and finds a movie producer talking about turning her book into a movie, but describing the movie as very different than the book’s plot. She ends up going to Hollywood/LA to confront the producer to stop debasing her novel. A writer complains to the director for cutting any lines that require any acting so the director’s girl can perform the part with her lack of acting skill. It turns out the directory only bought it for the title and not to actually do the movie based on her book directly. She later finds she out she did sign away her right to meddle with the movie and she goes back to try and find him to apologize for interfering. She finds him dead in the graveyard set. Security thinks Jessica is the killer. The police do not seem to suspect her at all when they arrive, though. Jessica goes to see the producer’s girlfriend at his beach house to tell her that he was murdered, but first she has to sober the girl up. The police officer comes to see Jessica because the Captain thinks Jessica had the motive and opportunity to kill the producer, but the officer does not think she did it, so she just must remain in town. The police officer sort of arrests her after her words are turned against her. She is not actually booked and the police officer gives her a chance to not only clear her name, but find the actual killer. Jessica finds out about a drum major costume being taken from the costume was last borrowed by the girlfriend of the dead producer. When she goes to the girls trailer she finds the director hiding in there and the police end up finding the missing button in his pocket. He is arrested as the murderer. Jessica realizes he is also wrongly accused, though. She realizes the girlfriend killed the producer because she was having an affair with the co-star and the producer wanted to replace him with another actor.

“It’s a Dog’s Life” - Jessica is at a hunting lodge with her cousin in this episode. While on a fox hunting horse ride a man dies when he falls off a runaway horse. It seems something was wrong with the horse and they suspect foul play, but the authorities are not convinced. The man ends up giving everything to his dog and the children will be entirely cut out if the will if the dog dies of anything except natural causes. A man says the dog attacked his arm and wants the dog put down. The dog is released without being put down. The lawyer now has to defend the dog against the man who was attacked as well as the son trying to break the will by challenging the dog as being of sound mind to receive the money. One of the daughters is killed when the gate closes on her body and the only living person known to be in the security room at the time was the dog. Jessica thinks that the dog was trained to press the button. She suspects he was trained to do it when he hears a whistle and a whistle with Jessica’s cousin’s initials was found by the police on the grounds. Jessica realizes the lawyer tricked the daughter that was killed to drug the horse to kill her father thinking she would have an inheritance and then later the lawyer killed Trish framing the dog because he needed the income that would come from defending the dog.

“Lovers and Other Killers” - Jessica’s friend Edmund picks Jessica up at the airport on a trip that she is going to give a lecture at the university Edmund works at. Jessica hires a male secretary to help her during the trip. The evening of the lecture she goes out to dinner with the secretary. After dinner a detective picks him up for questioning in a home invasion murder a few nights before. Jessica gets a call from a woman telling her to meet the woman later that night because she has info to clear the secretary of the murder charge. When she goes to meet the woman she witnesses the woman dying. The woman was the secretary’s alibi as the two were going out that night. The secretary believes the husband killed his girlfriend, as she was having an affair with the secretary. In an other meeting with a tip Jessica is pushed down some stairs. It turns out that Edmund was going out with the first woman that was murdered and his secretary killed her because she was in love with Edmund.

“Hit, Run and Homicide” - It is time for the Cabot Cove Founder’s Day Picnic in this episode. A man is chased by a car with no apparent driver at the picnic. The sheriff does not believe that the car had no driver since he did not see it himself. The man was an out of towner and when his business partner comes to see him in the hospital he is run down by the same car. It turns out the inventor man, Daniel, in town built a remote control car a dozen years ago and is the same man that the two business men thought they were coming to Cabot Cove to meet, but Daniel says he did not invite them. The sheriff is unable to locate the phantom car. Jessica takes a bike ride to search the woods and ends up finding the car. She checks it out including getting into it and suddenly someone activates it locking her in and beginning to drive it down the road wildly with the person controlling it in a van behind her. They stop it right at the edge of a cliff. The Sheriff begins to suspect Daniel as the car is of his design. Jessica has the sheriff help set up a reenactment of the day of the picnic with someone else using a remote control to make it seem like the car is going to hit the same man as the first time. The woman, Leslie, rushes to a van to stop it, but it was a set up to make her give herself up as the murderer.