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 2.

“Broadway Malady” - Jessica goes to New York for a meeting with her publisher. Grady, her nephew, is working as an accountant for a Broadway production and wants her to come visit the set during rehearsals. In New York Grady takes Jessica to the female star’s house for a dinner get together. The co-star (the star’s daughter) is shot in an apparent mugging and her brother with her shoots and kills the bum that tried to mug them. The woman ends up in critical condition at the hospital. The situation seems fishy to Jessica and she thinks it was not a mugging, but a murder attempt from the start made to look like a mugging. Jessica tracks down a man that witnessed the mugging and noticed it was an amateur mugging. Jessica ends up recognizing the mugger in an old movie. The screenwriter quickly brings in his choice to take the place of the woman still in the hospital. The mother/star begins to suspect that the writer has been trying to replace her daughter since the beginning. Jessica begins to suspect that the mother is in danger and finds her passed out from gas poisoning. In the hospital now the mother is in critical condition while the daughter is recovering. She later dies and Jessica goes back to the house with the son. Jessica realizes he killed his mother and tried to kill his sister to inherit all the money, but after she survived he settled for getting half by still going through with the plan to kill his mother. After he confesses his mother comes in the room and reveals she survived and that it was a set up to get him to confess because she did not believe it was him at first.

“Murder to a Jazz Beat” - Jessica goes to New Orleans for a television interview for New Orleans Today. She ends up there two days early. She is introduced to a jazz musician who is about to move up to Las Vegas performances and some of those working for him are disappointed about being left behind. The musician collapses and dies while playing his clarinet in a final New Orleans performance. Jessica thinks it is a quick acting poison. The think the poison is in his coffee cup at first, but reviewing the tape they find that he was not the only one that drank from that cup. Thus the poison must have been somewhere else. They think the poison was put on the clarinet reed. When the reed is tested no poison is found on it. Jessica goes to the cemetery and finds out that the reed was not the original one. The coffee cup was taken to make it seem like the wife did it. His best friend is the one that changed the reed. He was afraid the musician would follow through and kill his wife, so he killed his best friend to save her, who he loved.

“My Johnny Lies Over the Ocean” - Jessica goes on a two week cruise with her niece, Pam, who needs a break after her husband committed suicide. On the trip Pam gets an odd note with Champagne saying the nickname her husband used to call her. Then at the restaurant the special in Pam’s menu says something that she made up and the waiter then says that is not on the menu and is wrong (i.e. only in Pam’s menu). Alone on deck at night Pam gets pushed and ends up with a head wound. Jessica suspects that someone might be trying to kill Pam. Jessica has her brother (a surgeon back home and Pam’s father) look into Pam’s husband’s biological mother, as her husband was adopted and was only once contacted by the mother and he never followed it up. Jessica thinks the person causing trouble for Pam is the husband’s deranged biological mother. She gets a telegram saying Til death do us part signed Johnny and she faints. A woman is found dead in her room supposedly from downing a bottle of barbituates. Photos of Pam’s husband and other things related to Pam’s husband are found with the dead woman. Jessica suspects that the woman was murdered by her husband. Jessica gets him to confess after revealing that his wife had not photography skill as he claimed she did because his wife took a picture of Jessica and Pam on the dock before they left port and it was not that great. The husband set it all up in a plot to try to get his wife’s money and make it seem like she committed suicide.

“Paint Me a Murder” - A painter is celebrating his 60th birthday with several of his friends invited to his island villa including Jessica. The night before Jessica arrives the painter is almost injured or killed when vase comes close to falling on him. Shortly after she arrives one of the men at the villa suffers a coronary and returns to the mainland with the painter’s son. The painter goes on a walk on the beach with Jessica and explains he saw a shadow of someone that tried to kill him with the vase. He asks Jessica to help look into who tried to kill him, as it must have been one of his guests. Jessica finds some cigarette butts and matches near where the vase fell from. An investigator is one of the guests and he noticed the vase was chiseled off. The clues lead to it seeming to have been a lefty, which is only the man that had a coronary and returned to the mainland. It turns out that man was also buying up the painter’s paintings and might have wanted the painter dead to increase the value of the paintings. The painter is shot and killed with a bow and arrow. The son is found to have snuck back to the island to steal some of his father’s paintings, which he says he wanted to use the money from to help his girlfriend who is in jail. A fire breaks out in the painter’s studio while his wife is in there. The sculptor that lived on the island disappears with his raft, which makes him a suspect, but it is revealed he is a defector from Bulgaria with a death warrant out on him. Thus he left not because he was guilty, but because he did not want his real identity to come out in a police investigation of the painter’s murder. Jessica realizes the murderer was Sir John, who arrived with Jessica, and the man with a coronary was the one that made the vase attempt on the painter’s life.