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I watched some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries when it was coming out -- I think the 1920s costumes and Intense Eye Contact propelled me about a season and a half into it before I ran face-first into my procedural television block, which is farther than I get into most procedurals tbh.
Then quite recently a cdrama adaptation came out, Miss S, that went up on HBO last year, and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenillypo (who had seen and loved all of Miss Fisher previously) wanted to add it to our list. So now we've watched all of that -- and then genarti, who had never seen any of the original Australian Miss Fisher, wanted to watch some for compare/contrast, which turned into watching the whole series for compare/contrast plus the movie, which we finished up last night. So for this brief moment in time we are now experts in the Miss Fisher Experience!
To be honest, I was not expecting the degree to which Miss S was a near-exact replica of Miss Fisher; I was expecting a similar setup (Independently Wealthy 1920s Style Icon Fights Crime While Engaging In Intense Eye Contact With Local Hot Policeman) and a bunch of different side characters and murder cases, but in fact all of the cases are direct equivalents of Miss Fisher episodes run through localization. This makes for some fascinating and sometimes very funny choices! My personal favorite is that the moderately racist plotline about Miss Fisher's Chinese Boyfriend, His Silk Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride has transformed in Miss S into an identical plotline about Miss S's Russian Boyfriend, His Linen Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride -- I imagine the writing team cackling to themselves when they made that decision -- but I also love every time the original is like 'ello ello zis mystery revolves around zese Bohemian painters ... zey have traveled all the way here from la France .....' and Miss S is like "yeah we had a very intense Bohemian painting scene in 1920s Hangzhou? these Bohemian painters are from Hangzhou."
Obviously the impacts of censorship on the adaptation are pretty notable; Miss S Can flirt widely but Cannot sleep around, and Miss Fisher's butch lesbian doctor friend is young and explicitly straight in her Miss S incarnation despite her dashing pantsuits. None of this was particularly unexpected (they did manage to keep one sympathetic gay couple who feature in one of the early mysteries, which honestly surprised me) but we were taken aback by the changes in the storyline regarding the plucky orphan adopted by both Miss Fisher and Miss S. In the original Miss Fisher episode, Miss Fisher's adopted daughter Jane's mother turns out to be alive, but deeply unstable; Miss Fisher promises to find Jane's mother a sanatorium where she can recover and where Jane can visit occasionally. In the Miss S storyline, Miss S's adopted daughter Su Yun's mother turns out to be alive, but deeply unstable in exactly the same ways as Jane's mother; Miss S sadly tells Su Yun that her real mother needs her and Miss S can't keep her from her, but Su Yun can come back and visit Miss S any time!
Also, Miss S' near-instant cahootship with her love interest and their seamless slide over the course of 34 episodes towards "oh yeah we're more or less engaged" without needing to discuss it is incredibly cute, but definitely a different and IMO less rich flavor than Miss Fisher and her love interest's three-season slow burn around their drastic lifestyle incompatibilities and mutual understanding of how extremely badly they could hurt each other if they got it wrong.
On the other hand, all of Miss S' murder mysteries get two full episodes each to play themselves out compared to the brisk hour Miss Fisher has to get in, solve her murder, and get out, which I think is usually for the better. Characters-of-the-week in Miss Fisher simply don't have time to have any actual emotions about the things that are happening to them, which is unfortunate because those things are so often wild. The average Miss Fisher episode features a small business with 4-5 employees; by the end of any given episode, 2-3 of those employees will be dead, 1-2 more will have been arrested, and Miss Fisher will pat the shellshocked survivor on the shoulder and assure them that they shouldn't give up on their dreams! What happens next? That is Not Miss Fisher's Problem. This becomes particularly glaring any time we get a Sympathetic Murderer, they confess to their crime of murder in the name of self-defense or protecting their child or whatnot and are led away, and in the next scene Miss Fisher and her police boyfriend are toasting each other to another job well done. Sometimes I do think that Peter Wimsey and his fits of guilt over the ethics of crime-fighting have ruined me for all other fictional detectives. Anyway, if I owned a small Australian business, I would simply ban her from the precipices.
Miss S caps itself off with the plot that concludes Miss Fisher's first season, but throws in a lot more dramatic Lost Tomb-style bells and whistles (rewatching the Miss Fisher season finale felt deeply anticlimactic in contrast tbh). I'm rather sorry that it never got around to Miss Fisher's Season Two ACAB plot about corruption in the police force, but I don't mourn Miss Fisher's Season Three arc-plot rehabilitating her deadbeat dad, nor the Miss Fisher movie, which was ... not good .... I was going to say more about how it was not good but this post is already very long and I'm quite sleepy, so if anyone particularly cares I can wax longer in a comment tomorrow!
Then quite recently a cdrama adaptation came out, Miss S, that went up on HBO last year, and
tenillypo (who had seen and loved all of Miss Fisher previously) wanted to add it to our list. So now we've watched all of that -- and then genarti, who had never seen any of the original Australian Miss Fisher, wanted to watch some for compare/contrast, which turned into watching the whole series for compare/contrast plus the movie, which we finished up last night. So for this brief moment in time we are now experts in the Miss Fisher Experience! To be honest, I was not expecting the degree to which Miss S was a near-exact replica of Miss Fisher; I was expecting a similar setup (Independently Wealthy 1920s Style Icon Fights Crime While Engaging In Intense Eye Contact With Local Hot Policeman) and a bunch of different side characters and murder cases, but in fact all of the cases are direct equivalents of Miss Fisher episodes run through localization. This makes for some fascinating and sometimes very funny choices! My personal favorite is that the moderately racist plotline about Miss Fisher's Chinese Boyfriend, His Silk Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride has transformed in Miss S into an identical plotline about Miss S's Russian Boyfriend, His Linen Import Business, And His Communist Arranged Marriage Bride -- I imagine the writing team cackling to themselves when they made that decision -- but I also love every time the original is like 'ello ello zis mystery revolves around zese Bohemian painters ... zey have traveled all the way here from la France .....' and Miss S is like "yeah we had a very intense Bohemian painting scene in 1920s Hangzhou? these Bohemian painters are from Hangzhou."
Obviously the impacts of censorship on the adaptation are pretty notable; Miss S Can flirt widely but Cannot sleep around, and Miss Fisher's butch lesbian doctor friend is young and explicitly straight in her Miss S incarnation despite her dashing pantsuits. None of this was particularly unexpected (they did manage to keep one sympathetic gay couple who feature in one of the early mysteries, which honestly surprised me) but we were taken aback by the changes in the storyline regarding the plucky orphan adopted by both Miss Fisher and Miss S. In the original Miss Fisher episode, Miss Fisher's adopted daughter Jane's mother turns out to be alive, but deeply unstable; Miss Fisher promises to find Jane's mother a sanatorium where she can recover and where Jane can visit occasionally. In the Miss S storyline, Miss S's adopted daughter Su Yun's mother turns out to be alive, but deeply unstable in exactly the same ways as Jane's mother; Miss S sadly tells Su Yun that her real mother needs her and Miss S can't keep her from her, but Su Yun can come back and visit Miss S any time!
Also, Miss S' near-instant cahootship with her love interest and their seamless slide over the course of 34 episodes towards "oh yeah we're more or less engaged" without needing to discuss it is incredibly cute, but definitely a different and IMO less rich flavor than Miss Fisher and her love interest's three-season slow burn around their drastic lifestyle incompatibilities and mutual understanding of how extremely badly they could hurt each other if they got it wrong.
On the other hand, all of Miss S' murder mysteries get two full episodes each to play themselves out compared to the brisk hour Miss Fisher has to get in, solve her murder, and get out, which I think is usually for the better. Characters-of-the-week in Miss Fisher simply don't have time to have any actual emotions about the things that are happening to them, which is unfortunate because those things are so often wild. The average Miss Fisher episode features a small business with 4-5 employees; by the end of any given episode, 2-3 of those employees will be dead, 1-2 more will have been arrested, and Miss Fisher will pat the shellshocked survivor on the shoulder and assure them that they shouldn't give up on their dreams! What happens next? That is Not Miss Fisher's Problem. This becomes particularly glaring any time we get a Sympathetic Murderer, they confess to their crime of murder in the name of self-defense or protecting their child or whatnot and are led away, and in the next scene Miss Fisher and her police boyfriend are toasting each other to another job well done. Sometimes I do think that Peter Wimsey and his fits of guilt over the ethics of crime-fighting have ruined me for all other fictional detectives. Anyway, if I owned a small Australian business, I would simply ban her from the precipices.
Miss S caps itself off with the plot that concludes Miss Fisher's first season, but throws in a lot more dramatic Lost Tomb-style bells and whistles (rewatching the Miss Fisher season finale felt deeply anticlimactic in contrast tbh). I'm rather sorry that it never got around to Miss Fisher's Season Two ACAB plot about corruption in the police force, but I don't mourn Miss Fisher's Season Three arc-plot rehabilitating her deadbeat dad, nor the Miss Fisher movie, which was ... not good .... I was going to say more about how it was not good but this post is already very long and I'm quite sleepy, so if anyone particularly cares I can wax longer in a comment tomorrow!
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okay so the things that do not work about the Miss Fisher movie:
- just a complete and total embrace of ye olde White People Have Exotic Adventures In the Desert mode
- none of the regular cast is there except Jack (and her aunt for a bit), which is slightly awkward given that the plot kicks off with Alas, Phryne Is Dead And Here's Her Memorial Service and it's being hosted by some episode-of-the-week randos with neither her parents nor her adopted daughter present
- Miss Fisher's just-for-the-movie sidekick gets nothing to do except be a plot device
- the Jack-and-Phryne dynamic of the film is built around Bickering over Misunderstandings (she didn't pretend to be dead on purpose but she Did lavender marry a maharajah and Jack is Very peeved about it) which is intended to get them to the point of full romantic reconciliation but given that their dynamic in the show is so much an intense & unusual slow-burn about the way in which they do understand each other, collapsing back into a much more generic-feeling Bickering Sexual Tension feels very unsatisfying! to me! even if he does have to rescue her from quicksand, shirtless!
the things that do work about the Miss Fisher movie:
- okay these are mostly actually just things I think are very funny about the Miss Fisher movie
- this isn't actually a 'thing that works' I just think it's SO funny when they're all hanging out IN A TOMB for the big finale and suddenly THE MURDERER IS AMONG US NOW. how did he get here?? from England??? WHO could say that's NOT the point
- Alexander The Great's Mummified Bride, Preserved In Honey is also a very very funny plot device
- real shout outs to Jack's actor who's doing some truly incredible face acting during the Miss Fisher's Fake Funeral scene, that one absolutely did hit
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And yes, I was so annoyed that none of the regular cast showed up! Why do movie sequels to TV shows so often do this? Surely they understand that the reason we want to see the movie is to revisit all our old TV show friends! What is Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries without Dottie and Mac and Bert and Cec?