CHICAGO — Last month, writing about Hollywood’s recent tendency to turn a solid premise for movie into a multi-episode TV series instead (and not to the story’s betterment), I mentioned that even though seasonlong arcs have become the norm, television doesn’t have to rely on them in order to be good. And I noted my habit of returning to shows like “Murder, She Wrote” to remind myself of the ways a self-contained story can actually work, introducing a handful of new characters each time, and coming to a satisfying conclusion some 40 minutes later.
Not long after that column ran, I got an email from Chicago native Thomas B. Sawyer, who was a writer on “Murder, She Wrote” from its inception in 1984, later becoming showrunner for the last five seasons until the series came to an end in 1996.
At its height, the show was drawing 23 million viewers a week on CBS. Curious to hear his thoughts about why the show connected with audiences, I called Sawyer at his Malibu home.
Everything about the show’s success hinged, he said, on as murder mystery novelist and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher, a winning marriage of actor and character, resulting in a performance that is smart and no-nonsense. Practical but cosmopolitan. Compassionate when the situation warrants and no clutching at pearls when she learns of sexual affairs. She never doubts her self-worth or her instincts and she doesn’t let fame go to her head. She lives a full life! And she fits in just about anywhere, regardless of the company, which is why a crossover episode with “Magnum, P.I.” from 1986 somehow actually works.
Sawyer also talked about his approach to storytelling, which he details in his memoir, “The Adventures of the REAL Tom Sawyer” (yes, he goes by Tom Sawyer, more on that below) where he writes: “My take was that each show was a play in which a group of interesting, colorful characters were — before page one — in conflict with each other about something. And, in the course of their struggles, a murder had to take place … I almost didn’t care about the details of the murder, because our main challenge was to make the method, circumstances and surrounding characters seem different from the last six or seven episodes.” It had to be a brand new story every time, starting from scratch. That’s the challenge of episodic TV writing.
“Murder, She Wrote” airs daily in reruns across several cable channels and is streamable on Peacock. Sawyer offered his insights into why the show still has such staying power.
Q: What do you think makes “Murder, She Wrote” work as well as it does, even all these years later?
A: Certainly having Angela as the lead didn’t hurt. In my career up to that point, I was writing for a lot of mediocre actors. So when I got a chance to write for Angela, I felt like, holy (crap), what an honor. I was on staff on 15 series, but most of them didn’t last more than a season. So to get lucky enough to get hooked up to a series with that kind of longevity was just astonishing.
The frustrating part for me was, here we have one of the world’s greatest actresses and we were using such a tiny portion of her range. At one point, I wrote an episode that’s a callback to the pilot episode, when she had just become a published writer and the publisher, Preston Giles, is the murderer. So I wrote an episode called “The Return of Preston Giles” and he gets shot at the end, and I wanted him to die in her arms. That’s the way I wrote the script. But the way they shot it, she’s standing there looking down at his body (laughs). I had wanted to give her something more emotional to play, but she just didn’t want to do it. I never discussed it with her, she just chose to stay away from that. And that wasn’t the style of the show, anyway.
Q: Did you write your scripts on your own or was it a group effort?
A: I would come up with a premise — a one line thing you would pitch — and if they liked it, you’d go write it. My favorite episode that I wrote was called “No Laughing Murder” starring Buddy Hackett and Steve Lawrence as an old comedy duo who’d had a falling out, like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. And the idea was, the son of one (an early role for George Clooney) is about to marry the daughter of the other, and the two guys have been at loggerheads for years. So my pitch on it was: Martin and Lewis meets “Romeo and Juliet.”
It was one of the rare times where I wrote the thing for a particular actor, in this case Buddy Hackett. Buddy was famously coarse around women and so we literally made a deal with his attorney that Buddy would promise to behave himself around Angela. So it’s the first day of the shoot and I’m standing on the entry ramp with Buddy and the crew is getting set up, and everybody’s a little nervous about how Buddy’s going to behave with her. And the sedan pulls up and Angela gets out and I introduce her to Buddy and he’s very polite with her. She had just won a Golden Globe, I should mention that. So they have this brief hello and then she excused herself to go up to makeup and wardrobe. And as she’s walking away, Buddy turns to the crowd and says, out of the side of his mouth, typical Buddy Hackett: “Those really are a pair of golden globes.”
Q: Oh no.
A: Angela cracked up, as well as everyone else.
Q: Do you have an opinion about stand-alone episodes, which is what you wrote, versus season-long arcs that predominate today?
A: Oh, a lot. Today, the requirement is that you have these ongoing character arcs but it’s hard to sustain that — harder to do it than the way we did it. Take a show like “Weeds” (about a suburban mom-turned-drug-dealer) where, two years into it, it began to fall apart because of that requirement to keep those characters in their arcs. It’s a tough challenge for writers.
Q: Telling a succinct story in 40-minutes probably has its own challenges. You have so little time to establish these new characters.
A: It’s almost unheard of today. Basically the idea is to get into your story as late as you can. You want it to feel like there’s so much that’s already been happening by the time the episode begins. The story is already in progress when the episode opens and we’d catch the audience up on what the hell they’re arguing about (laughs). No gore, no violence. And we had three motives: Money, sex or power. We didn’t have to get into forensics, and we never did serial killers. Serial killer stories or kidnapping stories are always the same; they’re about the good guys trying to get into the heads of a crazy person and that doesn’t interest me.
By the way, Let me tell you something about the songs in one of my episodes called “Broadway Malady.” Several years earlier, when I was just starting in the business, I had lunch with some writers and they said, ‘Whenever you have an episode and you have an opportunity to write song lyrics — like, if the characters go into a nightclub and a song is playing — do it, because you’ll get royalties.” So, I’m writing “Broadway Malady,” which is about a Broadway musical in rehearsals, and I turned the script in and that evening I get a call and they asked, “When you indicate that they’re rehearsing, do want us to write the song lyrics or do you want to write them?” And I instantly remembered what these guys had advised me and I said, “I’ll do it!” And I knocked off several pastiches of Broadway show lyrics and joined ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) and so far I have earned, from that one 10-minute stint of writing lyrics, about $60,000 in royalties. That’s on top of the residuals I get for writing the episode itself. It’s a mindblower!
You know, I actually began as a commercial artist. I grew up in the South Shore neighborhood, just a few blocks south of Jackson Park and then I moved to New York when I was 20 and started drawing comic books for Stan Lee. And once I got into advertising illustration, it drove me crazy that your artwork gets used over and over again but you never see another nickel beyond the one-time fee you were paid to do it. So when I came to Hollywood, it blew my mind. It’s been a life-changer, income-wise.
Q: Tell me about being named Tom Sawyer.
A: My original family name is not Sawyer, it’s Scheuer. And if you pronounce it properly in German it sounds a little like Sawyer. But no one could ever pronounce it — I would hear “Shewer,” “Sheever,” “Shaner,” and on and on. And once I’d explain that, no, it’s “Shawyer,” they’d ask me, “How’s Huck?”
I felt like I spent all this time explaining how to pronounce my name, so when I was still in New York doing advertising illustration, I began to sign my work “Tom Sawyer.” And when I got to Hollywood and got my first gig, I decided that was time to change my name and I legally changed it to Sawyer.
It made my life so much easier!
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