Acorn TV’s “cozy mysteries” are usually from somewhere in the UK or Australia. Even ones that take place outside those two locals star British actors. But their new series, You’re Killing Me, takes place in a New England town and stars Brooke Shields, Amalia Williamson, and Tom Kavanagh.
Opening Shot: The small New England town of Founders Cove. At a mystery writers’ convention, author Allison Chandler (Brooke Shields) picks up her 20th award for her latest Selina St. Cloud mystery novel.
The Gist: She’s introduced by literary critic Nash Gilbert (Matthew MacFadzean), al longtime friend. As she’s having lunch with her agent (Carlo Rota), she sees Nash arguing with her fellow author, Lee Granway (Milton Barnes). During the lunch, her agent also tells her that maybe it’s time for her to retire Selina St. Cloud and modernize her subject matter, a notion that Allison completely rejects.
During a book signing, Andrea Walker (Amalia Williamson), who made her name as a true crime podcaster, gives Allison a book to sign — for her grandmother. This is when Allison recognizes Andrea from an TV interview where she said that books like hers are unrealistic. Generational bickering ensues.
As Allison leaves the hotel after giving an evening seminar, she sees Nash crash onto the roof of a car parked right outside, killing him. When she asks a local cop who’s in charge of the investigation, she’s introduced to a new county detective, Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh), who claims not to know who she is and thinks she’s in the way.
What surprises Allison as she leaves Nash’s hotel room, though, is that Andrea has also been snooping around, and in fact got into the room before the cops did. This is why she already knows, via forensic evidence and not Allison’s gut feeling, that Noah was murdered.
The two of them investigate separately, with Andrea following foresnic evidence and finding people vis internet sleuthing, while Allison visits Noah’s lake house, talks to Lee, etc. Everywhere Allison goes, though, she finds that Andrea is also there. That’s when the two of them have some coffee and find out a little about each other, to the point where they reluctantly team up, not only to solve Noah’s murder but to write about it in a book.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by TV veteran Robin Bernheim Burger (Shields is also an EP), You’re Killing Me is similar to any number of Acorn’s “cozy mystery” series, like Harry Wild. Of course, the uber-show in the category is Murder, She Wrote. Fun fact: At the start of Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury was a little over a year younger than Brooke Shields is at the start of this new series.
Our Take: The reason why we mentioned the age thing is that Bernheim Burger, along with veteran comedy and mystery writers Phoef Sutton, Lee Goldberg and Derek Thompson, leans heavily into the age difference between Allison and Andrea in the first episode, mostly showing Allison acting like an old fuddy duddy about podcasting, Gen Z lingo, technology, and basically everything else that came into the world after 2005.
Yes, this made for some chuckleworthy moments. But they piled up so much in the first episode that we wondered if Alison had fallen into a coma 20 years ago and just woke up to a new and mystifying world. She can’t tap her credit card to pay for coffee! She says “the Zooms”! She can’t understand half of what Andrea is saying! Sixty year olds are not that clueless anymore, and it would have been better to just see how differently Allison and Andrea approach investigating a murder without putting a neon pointer on their age difference.
Then again, the first two episodes show two different Allisons: In the second, she hosts a wedding for her son’s friend, whom she’s known since they were kids, where one of the groomsmen dies. Here, she’s demanding at times and scattered at others. The jokes about the age differences have been scaled back, but Allsion is so over-the-top manic at times there is little grounding to what she does to investigate the murder.
The mysteries themselves have too many characters in them; with the phalanx of groomsmen all suspected in the second episode, for instance, it was hard to keep track of which one was being discussed, or even remember which one was the one who actually died.
But in a character-driven cozy mystery, though, the mysteries themselves are secondary to the chemistry between the main characters and the small-town feel that’s fostered by the supporting ones. We really enjoyed Shields and Williamson together when they got down to either working on the investigation or were talking about personal matters, like Andrea’s mother disappearing when she was young. We enjoyed the banter between Sheilds and Cavanagh, and it’s not hard to see them having a will-they-won’t-they vibe throught the season. We just hope that the writers can home in on Shields’ character and figure out exactly who Allison is.
Performance Worth Watching: Amalia Williamson really shines as Andrea, who admits to Andrea that she’d much rather write, and she even lost the rights to the podcast that bears her name. Williamson’s timing is great and she seems give Andrea the right amount of confidence so she doesn’t seem like some cartoonishly-arrogant zoomer.
Sex And Skin: Not really, but the show isn’t necessarily suitable for the entire family.
Parting Shot: Allison tells Andrea she can move into her guest house, but “No ravers!” (she means “ragers”).
Sleeper Star: Cavanagh was a nice addition as Det. Kerrigan, who gives the crusty, doubting detective character a bit his signature impish charm.
Most Pilot-y Line: There are segments during the first two episodes where Allison tries to “read” Kerrigan by observing what he is wearing, smells like, etc., a la Sherlock Holmes. Oddly, it’s the only person she does that with.
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Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re giving You’re Killing Me a tenuous recommendation because we like the chemistry between Shields, Williamson and Kavanagh, and the show definitely has some funny moments. But the show really needs to nail down Shields’ character and tighten the mysteries a bit to really make this a show a viewer can get cozy with.
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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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