Crime Is Made Squeaky-Clean in MR. AND MRS. MURDER (2013)

Originally posted January 6, 2025.

Recently, I’ve been killing time while my wife is commuting home by checking out the offerings on Acorn TV. The streaming service has a lot of mysteries and a lot of British shows, but it also has quite a few Australian shows that I’d never heard of, which made for a nice change of pace. Mr. and Mrs. Murder (2013), a witty mystery series about a plucky married couple whose cheerful attitudes contrast with their grisly job as crime scene cleaners, was one of these. Verdict: watchable, if you have nothing else to put on.

I initially assumed that Mr. and Mrs. Murder was following in the footsteps of the British comedy series The Cleaner (2021), until I realized that it had actually been released in 2013. In that case, it would seem to be the first anglosphere take on the German TV series Der Tatortreiniger (“Crime Scene Cleaner”), which debuted two years earlier, in 2011. That, or it’s just one of those weird cultural zeitgeists where two people land on the same idea around the same time.

Nicola and Charlie Buchanan run an industrial cleaning business which has a contract with the police for cleaning and biohazard disposal at murder scenes. In the course of this, they often notice details that the police have missed, and end up solving the murder (dare I say… cleaning up crime?). Thankfully, the series doesn’t try to plod through a tortuous pilot where Nicola feels something is missing in her life, but discovers that she has a talent for investigation, and so on and so forth—we’re just dropped in, told they do this, and the premise is allowed to stand for itself.

Charlie (Shaun Micallef) is a slightly persnickety and hygiene-conscious nerd, a less exaggerated take on the Adrian Monk archetype, as well as what you might call a “wife guy”. Nicola (Kat Stewart) is the grounded one, I guess, and the primary crime-solving force, but I’m not really sure what makes her that way. Nosiness? The other recurring characters are the Buchanans’ surly niece Jess (Lucy Honigman), and Detective Vinetti (Jonny Pasvolsky), their homicide contact, who might have a crush on Nicola. I thought this bunch were a promising cast in the first episode, and the second, but they ended up simply… persisting. The relationship drama with Vinetti is barely relevant. Nicola and Charlie don’t have any relationship problems to speak of, or character arcs, really. They’re archetypes from the “Let’s give Cindy ‘whistling’!” school of character design: the kind drawn with just enough broad strokes to get the point across so you can move on to the meat of the mystery.

Not that the mysteries are particularly meaty. If you’re worried the setup might lean into gore-comedy, it does not: the clean-up is usually a montage, and the tone of the series is hardcore (softcore?) “cozy”. An illustrative example of the show’s tone is the second episode. When the victim was mauled to death Baskerville-style in an apparent animal attack, aggravating Nicola’s dog phobia (“Let’s give Nicola ‘fear of dogs’!”), I was waiting for the inevitable reveal that the attack had actually been committed by a human. Nope, the possibility never comes up. Nicola is (barely) forced to confront her fear, but not her biases.

(If you’re wondering “Does the Dog Die?” no, the dog is simply moved elsewhere to live out his happy doggie life. The reactive dog. Who killed someone by tearing him to pieces. …Yay?)

Most episodes are like this: straightforward, though the exact person responsible might take a bit of digging; characters who are quirky but not parody-funny; and an upbeat resolution. It’s all quite twee and quite heterosexual (in one episode, the only gay character is revealed to be straight), though as TV marriages go, this is quite a healthy one.

So you’re not watching it for the characters, or the plot—I guess what’s left is the banter (and the opening credits, which are animated in the style of pulp comic books, and are awesome). There’s lighthearted, humorous conversation between two main characters that are hopelessly in love with each other, they solve an easy mystery, that’s the show. Overall I found the viewing experience to be a bit like watching the later Monk episodes, which is to say rather weightless, but makes for tolerable marathon viewing if you’re laid up in bed with an illness. Just, perhaps a little too clean for me.