Snark Attack: “Murder He Wrote.” A.K.A. “Castle.”

A few weeks ago, I told you all about my love/hate relationship with mythologized TV shows. This week we turn to a genre that’s its exact opposite – those tidily self-contained procedural dramas where the only on-going storyline is whether or not any of the main characters are going to shtup.

I like to think of this as “Law and Orgasm” television. “Law” because of these shows’ tendency to focus on some crime/mystery element. And “Orgasm” because, while they might have some colorful variations along the way, they culminate in endings that, while satisfying, are pretty much foregone conclusions.

When I was a kid, I gobbled these shows up like jelly beans. Shows like The Rockford Files, and Charlie’s Angels, and Hart to Hart, and my absolute favorite, The Hardy Boys/ Nancy Drew Mysteries.

Each in their own way had very personal appeal to me. I fantasized, for example, about one day having a job whose primary function appeared to involve sitting around waiting for the phone to ring (plus wearing a lot of different wigs). Or about being so rich and bored that I would look forward to my friends getting murdered just because it would give my husband and me something fun to do on a Saturday night.

The Hardy Boys was especially spine-tingling to me. Of course, as a wee gay lad, it wasn’t exactly my spine that was tingling at the sight of Shaun Cassidy da-doo-ron-ronning his way shirtless across the beach.

Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy - fighting crime, catching waves

While I loved these shows’ core casts, I loved their rotating roster of special guest stars even more. Basically these shows were all like The Love Boat, except instead of visiting Puerto Vallarta to buy floppy hats, guest stars were strangled, swindled, or executed.

Even at a young age, I realized this made guessing the outcome of these presumed whodunnits laughably easy to figure out. All one had to do was remember the Law of Seconds. This well-known TV plotting stratagem stipulates that the culprit will always be the second-most famous guest star that week … the most famous guest being the one who spends the hour under high suspicion, until the big twist in the final five minutes reveals it was the second banana all along.

So, for example, if one of those old shows had these guest stars …

(L to r) Charo, Kristy McNichol, Audrey Landers

… then the “killer” would obviously have been Kristy McNichol. Duh.