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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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!!! I haven't watched the show because I read the books at an early enough age that the changes the show made would have just bugged me too much (among other things, Jack Robinson is happily married and has no sexual tension with Phryne at all), so I didn't know they made the bride communist! In the original moderately racist plotline in the books, the problem isn't that she's a communist, it's that she has a Dark Secret[*] and is acting squirrelly because of it, and also that Mr Butler is paranoid about having to give evidence in a divorce court, so he gives notice now Phryne's dating a married man.[**]
[* The Dark Secret is that the woman Lin Chung was engaged to died. The family didn't want to break off the engagement, so they sent her older cousin who'd just been widowed. She is accordingly Not A Virgin. Phryne is able to assure her that this will not be a problem for Lin Chung.]
[** Phryne hires a new butler and asks Mr Butler to spend his notice period training him. The new butler tells so many horror stories about worse employers than Phryne, that Mr Butler changes his mind and withdraws his notice, very much to Phryne's and Mrs Butler's relief.]
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.
They what? (In the books, Phryne has two adoptive daughters, Jane and Ruth. I knew they'd compressed that into one daughter in the TV series, but I didn't know this part. I can't remember what the deal with Jane's parents was -- orphan, I think -- but Ruth's mother's in a sanatorium because she's dying of tuberculosis.)
What happens next? That is Not Miss Fisher's Problem.
In the books, she ends up either adopting or employing a LOT of people.
There also is at least one book that deals with the fact that the killer's going to be executed for it. I wouldn't say it handles it well, but she does arrange to fulfill the condemned man's last request, which is something deeply horrible.
Anyway, if I owned a small Australian business, I would simply ban her from the precipices.
She tips lavishly and also brings them a lot of business in a time when they needed it. I guess at least some people would have wanted to risk it.
Miss Fisher's Season Three arc-plot rehabilitating her deadbeat dad
...That definitely didn't happen in the books. She has to interact with her deadbeat dad in one book, but he just wants her to do him a favour and accompany a disfigured veteran back to Orkney, which she does for the soldier's sake, not her dad's. (She finds a body there, because of course she does.)
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(I am very sad the show doesn't have a Mrs Butler.)
Yeah, Jane is originally presented/presenting as a plucky street urchin who's run away from a thieves' gang, but several episodes later a woman starts lurking around Miss Fisher's house with big sad eyes and it turns out this is her mother who's just been discharged from hospital, who is very nice and loves her daughter very much but also is tuberculitic and has unfortunate bouts of paranoia and and a tendency to almost let the house burn down in the middle of the night.
TV show Miss Fisher ends up adopting or employing a bunch of people in the first three episodes until they fill up the cast roster, at which point they start needing to find other solutions for problems that clearly would have been solved by her adopting or employing somebody if the show had Infinite Budget for Supporting Actors. A lot of people move temporarily into her house for the course of an episode and conveniently find somewhere else to be or something else to do by the time the hour wraps up, and I think a couple of them get kicked over to be on Aunt Prudence's Staff so we can be assured that they're doing okay but won't see them around ...
The season three arc-plot is all about Miss Fisher's Deadbeat Dad lurking around Australia and refusing to go home and stealing her money and acting generally shady while a mysterious man accuses him of dark secrets and murders people in his vicinity, and in the final episode it turns out the mysterious man is his shellshocked cousin and Miss Fisher's Deadbeat Dad Did Nothing Wrong. Profoundly unsatisfying tbh!
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Mrs Butler is great.
it turns out the mysterious man is his shellshocked cousin and Miss Fisher's Deadbeat Dad Did Nothing Wrong.
Ugh. Whatever one might say about the books, they are typically better than that about PTSD.
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(These books were a fixture of my adolescence.)