You settle down on the couch, maybe under a blanket or with a snack, and turn on the TV.
What you’re really craving right now is to watch something with a juicy puzzle to solve — maybe about a murder.
Despite a world filled with grim headlines, audiences are consistently drawn to murder-mystery shows. While crime dramas explore darker themes, a classic whodunnit offers something more playful and won’t leave you feeling that society is doomed.
While murder mystery shows are playful, other crime genres are more serious.
RNZ / Patrice Allen
What’s feeding our fascination?
Sometimes dubbed “cosy crime”, murder mysteries have a distinctive theatrical format.
Think eccentric characters and colourful costumes, combined with plenty of head-scratching puzzles and clever plot twists.
“The audience engages with the murder as a type of challenge: ‘Can I solve it? Can I find the clues?” he says.
“It’s easy-breezy Saturday night entertainment that you can lie back and enjoy. It’s lovely pictures, a good puzzle, some fun suspects and a great resolution at the end.”
Contrary to what the genre’s name suggests, a murder mystery is usually removed from the realities of homicide.
In fact, there’s almost never blood or gore, says cultural historian Dr Lisa Hackett.
“It’s not a thriller or a horror with lots of blood. In a crime novel or show, it’s often bloodless,” she says.
“The body is kind of abstract … a shadowy body ‘over there’.
“We want to feel that distance, to feel safe and not confronted.”
Instead, the genre’s emphasis is on the whodunnit mystery. Clues are presented along the way, encouraging the audience to solve the puzzle before the detective does.
“Murder is just the tool that you use to play the game,” Mattessi says.
New Zealand actress Robyn Malcolm stars in the hit ABC crime drama Return to Paradise.
Courtesy of ABC iview
In the case of Return to Paradise, the show gives viewers a sense of certainty.
“There’ll be a body at the start within four or five minutes, but don’t worry: by the time 8:30pm comes around, Mackenzie will have solved it,” Mattessi says.
“It is a comforting thing to watch the goodies get the baddies in a really clever — and hopefully surprising and entertaining — way.”
The show — a spin-off of the popular BBC Death in Paradise franchise — has found a dedicated community of fans on Reddit, where devoted viewers share theories and embrace the interconnected Death in Paradise “Paraverse” of characters.
Uniquely though, the Australian offshoot has captured a surprise younger audience among 10- to 15-year-olds, and has attracted an “intense fandom” of tween girls, which Mattessi puts down to the game-playing and sexless romance.
“It’s the Glenn and McKenzie romance that they’re obsessed with … the way we tell that story is very pure,” he says.
“It’s really just about feelings, not about the complicated stuff that would come in a more adult relationship.”
The ‘psychological relief’
Even though the comfort of cosy crime has wide appeal for audiences, there is still an enormous appetite for the darker side of the genre — be it a crime novel, a true crime podcast, or a police investigation show.
At the start of Erin Patterson’s infamous murder trial this year, the ABC’s Mushroom Case Daily became one of Australia’s top five podcasts.
The daily court recap was downloaded 3.3 million times in May alone.
The ABC podcast Mushroom Case Daily closely followed the 11-week trial of triple murderer Erin Patterson.
ABC News
According to clinical psychologist Dr Max von Sabler, it’s innately human to be curious, and the genre allows us to explore the “darker corners of human behaviour” without real-world consequences.
“It’s perhaps not so much morbid fascination as it is an attempt to understand the extremes of human behaviour, so that our own lives feel more predictable and contained,” von Sabler says.
The neat narrative format of crime stories also provides us with a sense of order, he says.
“There’s a psychological relief that comes from seeing chaos resolved, motives uncovered, and the world made sense of again.
“For many people, that sense of resolution is soothing in a way that real life often isn’t.”
Hackett agrees, adding that even darker crime stories appeal to our natural tendency to want to solve the mystery.
“We like solving puzzles as humans,” Hackett says.
“A lot of real-world crimes are nonsensical, or they’re unsolved, or we don’t actually know why somebody did something.
“[Through crime fiction], we see justice being done and the feeling that the world is being put right.”
Season 1 of Return to Paradise is currently streaming on NEON.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand