As streaming services jockey with increasing intensity for the rights to enticing content, Acorn has scored a coup worth noting.
The three-season Australian series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, previously available on Netflix, moves to Acorn starting Monday.
Set in 1920s Australia, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is a charming series featuring Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, a woman well ahead of her time.
It's not completely unlike, say, Murder, She Wrote, with a female detective solving crimes in a world where she's not always entirely welcomed by her male colleagues.
Because crimes are solved within the hour, some of the sleuthing is handled with shortcuts. The producers always allow time, however, to let us see Miss Fisher tiptoeing into all the places where she theoretically does not belong.
She's quite the snoop, to be blunt, and much of that tiptoeing is accompanied by appropriately tinkling music. The crimes here are serious – murder and all – but the tone of the investigation process at times has an offsetting lightness.
Since Miss Fisher is a private detective, she is often accompanied by an actual policeman, Detective Inspector Jack Robinson (Nathan Page). While he finds her a nuisance, he also recognizes that she's good at what she does, and he wouldn't solve some of these crimes without her.
He also has a sort of thing for her, and vice versa, though they keep the attraction suppressed. In fact, we see it most often when one of her many gentleman admirers comes around, and Jack subtly reacts to what he clearly sees as encouraging or discouraging signs.
Unlike many overseas productions, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries has somewhat extended seasons, with 13 episodes in each of the first two and eight in the third.
The third season, spurred in part by a social media campaign, takes a slightly different tone and a markedly different turn with the arrival of Phryne's father Henry George Fisher (Pip Miller), also known as The Baron of Richmond.
Phryne has little time for him, a dislike whose full origins trickle out slowly as the season moves along. He's a scoundrel, it's clear, who lost the family fortune back in England and has come to Australia to hustle.
But he's also a charming rogue, and he works that charm on Miss Fisher's assistant, the straight-laced Dot (Ashleigh Cummings), and Jack Robinson's right-hand man Hugh Collins (Hugo Johnstone-Burt). Dot and Hugh have been an open item for a while, and the Baron sees a chance to help them along.
Dot is also worth noting because, aside from her competence and intuitive understanding of how to help Miss Fisher's investigations, she underscores just how far ahead of her time Miss Fisher was.
Dot is reasonably modern, having a job and opinions and other non-traditional traits like that. Miss Fisher is several decades further along.
As if her line of work weren't enough, she dresses in a manner shockingly revealing for the times. Mainly, she rejects the notion that a woman is nothing without a man.
Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries ended with its third season, and it has since spawned a sequel, the equally charming Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries. Ms. Fisher picks up Miss Fisher's spirit in the 1960s with her niece, Peregrine.
That's also available on Acorn, as will be the return of Miss Fisher herself, early next year in a movie-length drama titled Miss Fisher & The Crypt of Tears.