Female detectives being quite the trend on television these last few years, Lucy Lawless (top) proves in a new Australian series that there’s always room for one more.
My Life Is Murder, a 10-part series that launched three weeks ago in Australia, becomes available here on Monday through the streaming service Acorn.
As the title suggests, My Life Is Murder dabbles in the lighter side of lethal crime. The victims are no less dead and the perps no less reprehensible, but the path to solving the crimes has a light as well as a dark side.
Lawless plays Alexa Crowe, an ace police detective until she recently retired and resurfaced as a private investigator. She says came into money and decided she didn’t have to work full time any more, but then, she says a lot of things and not all of them are completely true.
For instance: She insists to her loyal sidekick Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans, with Lawless, right) that she does not have a cat. Madison asks about this with some frequency because Madison is allergic to cats and whenever she visits Alexa’s rather nice apartment, she begins to sneeze.
If Alexa admitted she had a cat, presumably, Madison would be less likely to visit, and while Alexa likes Madison personally, she has an even more compelling reason for Madison to drop by.
Since Alexa no longer works for the Police Department, she does not have access to department resources, which are helpful to private investigators as well. And in case it wasn’t clear earlier, Alexa doesn’t for a second want to leave the sleuth game.
The job, yes. The detective-ing, no.
Madison is the computer wizard who is now standard issue on every cop show. When a police officer or detective needs to find every detail of a suspect’s personal or financial history, the computer wiz opens a laptop, taps out a few keystrokes and suddenly we have a spreadsheet revealing everything except the suspect’s preference in gelato flavors.
Alexa also gets encouragement in her private investigation work from her former police boss, Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry).
His only hesitation, it seems early on, concerns the expenses she sometimes seems to run up.
But when you send a woman to investigate the possibly shady doings of a male escort, how else is she going to scope out his modus operandi without contracting for his services?
That does not, however, that Alexa is that kind of girl or My Life Is Murder is that kind of show. In contrast to a growing number of cable and streaming police shows that get pretty graphic, this one does not. It’s old school.
It’s also traditional in the sense that it’s a pretty straightforward procedural, with Alexa tackling a new case every episode. The running themes, at least the ones unveiled initially, run more toward establishing quaint little places where Alexa and Kieran meet, or having Alexa do battle with a high-end German bread-making device that at first doesn’t seem to want to make bread.
My Life Is Murder doesn’t strive for or require any deep meditation on the meaning of life. It’s a bunch of crime stories revolving around people we like – and if Alexa doesn’t ‘fess up to having a cat (whose name is Captain Thunderbolt), that’s not one of the crimes.