Welcome to Midsomer

I'm still going buck wild on Netflix. Part of the appeal is being able to watch what I want when I want for as long as I want. Most of the time, I have to ask Roomie to put the DVD in and turn it on, and then I feel beholden to watching the entire disc so he doesn't have to put it in every day for a week. It's tedious and leads to shows sitting on the shelf for months or years because the thought of watching five hours of murder and mayhem and bloody mayhem makes me want to claw my eyes out and hurl myself down the nearest set of stairs just to break the monotony. Nothing is fun when it carries the onus of obligation.

With Netflix, I can watch an episode, stop, read for a while, write, eat, go to the bathroom, bathe, and then come back and watch another if I choose or something else entirely, like a zombie movie. No obligation, just the freedom of choice that the mobile and able-bodied take for granted. For them, binge watching is a pleasurable choice, not an act of consideration by which to offset the gnawing guilt of needing so much physical help.

I'm currently watching Midsomer Murders. I love Inspector Barnaby, who's stuffy and possessed of dry sarcasm, yet surprisingly warm to victims and witnesses when need be. I don't know why he's so sniffy and contemptuous of his partner, Sergeant Troy. Troy is no peach, what with his homophobia and terrifying lack of driving skills, but he strikes me as a young detective who just needs a bit more seasoning. His early assumptions and conjectures aren't the gibberings of lunacy or the indifference of laziness, but the same assumptions anyone in his position would make. One could argue that he shouldn't be making such assumptions, and that's so, but if he didn't, then Barnaby wouldn't have the opportunity to display his intellectual superiority and thereby drive the plot.

The cases are cracked. The first involved incestuous siblings, and the second featured transvestite lovers, AIDS, and a barmy older sister who stowed her sainted brother's corpse in a locked bedroom for seven years. How no one smelled it in all those years is a mystery not even the intrepid Barnaby can solve, but the sight of the skeletal remains in a dressing gown and surrounded by candles made for an exquisitely Gothic visual. The insular village of Midsomer is deliciously sordid, Murder, She Wrote with British sensibilities and with fewer glaring potholes.

I'm going to savor this ride. And the freedom to take it at my own pace.