FOX’s Murder in a Small Town Is a Familiarly Cozy Canadian Mystery

Breaking news: charming small town conceals dark, violent secrets beneath a pleasant provincial veneer. 

It could be argued that the appeal of network television mystery shows is that you know exactly what you’re going to get from them, whether they’re set in tiny coastal towns or the high-stakes bureaucracy of New York’s justice system. The winningly blunt title of FOX’s first scripted international co-production, Murder in a Small Town, doesn’t just suggest the cozy calm of small town life shattered by vengeance and fatality, it also summons impressions of characters we’re going to see. There’s gonna be burnt-out newcomers from crime-ridden cities, bumbling locals with golden hearts, sparkly love interests not prepared to get hurt again. Someone will be divorced, someone will be unshaven. The big city detective’s sharp skill-set will be welcome for a town not used to two major crimes within a calendar year; the urban expatriates will welcome the slower pace of a sensitive, non-metropolitan life.

At a certain point, it writes itself—but as ruthlessly predictable as Murder in a Small Town is even after a single, 64-minute episode (the premiere episode will be broadcast in a 90-minute time slot, and was the only one screened for this critic), it doesn’t feel like it was made in a TV laboratory. Or at least, the lab technicians made sure to stir in a good deal of charm to their rote new series. There’s a difference between familiar writing and scripts that feel AI-assisted, because a writer knows what audiences want and a machine just mimics what’s come before. Murder in a Small Town hits its marks, with a likeable cast and a welcome emphasis on the dynamics between the outsider detective and the local suspects, but refuses to transcend the modest ambitions of your garden variety network mystery series. Which is fine, but there’s a ceiling to how willing we are to sing its praises.

It should be stressed that Murder in a Small Town is Canadian: it’s shot in British Columbia, features attractive coastal and woodland vistas, and is based on a lengthy novel series by the late Canadian author L.R. Wright. For authenticity, it even stars one of those Sutherland actors. Rossif Sutherland is Karl Alberg, the new police chief in Anywhere, British Columbia and a mild-mannered divorcee with a tall, broad build and lightly unconfident slouching posture—maybe because he’s a noticeably new face in an established community, maybe because he’s still nursing wounds from his old life. Neither are dipped into too much in the first episode, but anyone seasoned to this detective archetype (even in muted doses), can tell it’s a mix of both tensions.

The opening scene gives us an Agatha Christie-type murder, with snippets of dialogue from the victim (who clearly knows his killer) and choice cuts disguising the identity of the murderer. But we don’t meet Karl on the crime scene of 80-year-old Carlyle Burke, but rather a date with local lovelorn librarian Cassandra Lee (Kristin Kreuk), and their cautious-but-giving chemistry lets us know this mystery series is probably going to be more cute than psychologically troubling. When Karl does appear on the crime scene, he immediately uses some incredibly low-rent Sherlock (2010) powers to rack focus on very clearly signposted elements and draw fairly reasonable conclusions about what’s missing from the scene, and even what the murder weapon might be.

The premiere episode has a doozy of a guest star—well, a doozy within the context of lower-budget Canadian TV premieres. We are joined by character actor extraordinaire James Cromwell, who is exactly the kind of familiar face that puts a curious mystery drama audience at ease. Cromwell plays retired widower George Wilcox, who seems tortured and fragile in between his extended bouts of gardening. Karl quickly learns how close knit his new constituency is when he finds that George, his chief suspect in Carlyle’s murder, is close friends with his new paramour Cassandra. 

The greatest strength of “The Suspect,” Murder in a Small Town’s debut mystery, is not any clever misdirects or complex plotting, but that it knows that when one terrific actor (Cromwell) is paired with a pretty good actor (Sutherland) and given some textbook adversarial conflict, it makes for some darn enjoyable television. Instead of trying to hoodwink us, the folksy joy of this first mystery is letting us soak in the bitterness and indignation of two worse-for-wear men who are suspicious of each other, even if it does all take place in the renovated kitchens of overlit coastal cottages. Let character actors monologue on network television, and let them do it amongst stylish modern furnishings!

It’s difficult to tell if each of this season’s eight episodes will adapt a different one of Wright’s novels; she only wrote nine of them, so Murder in a Small Town will have to get creative fast if that’s the case. Of course, it’s impossible, to a frustrating degree, to judge if the Karl Alberg mysteries is a well-structured and formatted season of television because we were only allowed to see a single episode, and therefore we’re reluctant to recommend the series beyond this single entertaining hour of drama. If head writer and executive producer Ian Weir makes the series as actor-focused as the slight but charming first episode, then audiences who want to solve crimes and switch their brain off should be thrilled. Thrilled might be the wrong word—they’ll feel a warm, pleasant glow.

Murder in a Small Town premieres Tuesday, September 24th on FOX, streaming next day on Hulu. 

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

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