Brooke Shields stars in You’re Killing Me, a six-part comedy drama on U&Drama, as successful cosy mystery novelist Allison Chandler, who lives in the picturesque town of Founder’s Cove, Maine. The show has Murder, She Wrote vibes, but expectations should be lowered.
Allison’s publishers are beginning to make noises about the need to attract a younger demographic to her books. Allison – who is less a character than a loose assemblage of simple responses to stimulants, though things improve slightly after the pilot – is outraged. She is also incredibly rude to young true crime podcaster Andi (Amalia Williamson), who comes to her book signing, because she knows Andi has called her work “outdated and inaccurate”. But when her sleazebag pal Nash Gilbert (Matthew MacFadzean) suggests that her latest book maybe isn’t her best work, she executes her reflection-response instead.
Murder and mystery in Founder’s Cove
Before Nash can guide her further on this voyage of self-discovery, he has plummeted to his death from a balcony. An apparent suicide – or is it? Soon, Andi and Allison are brought together to investigate what they believe to be murder. The police, led by new county detective Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh), agree. Plot is added: a blackmail setup, a naive stepdaughter, impromptu gift shop closures become pivotal, and people are flung into car boots when nothing has happened for a while. Murder suspects duly emerge, are given a grilling by Allison and/or Andi, establish their alibis, and then are banished to the wings until it is time for one of them to re-emerge and drop himself in it.
Repeat with one new murder a week (adulterated EpiPen at a wedding, electrocution in a hot tub, and so on) set against the background of Andi and Allison learning to live, laugh, love, and write a book together. It’s not the publishing deal you get that matters, of course – it’s the intergenerational bickering you are scripted along the way.
Thin, lazy, and disappointing
There needs to be a moratorium on boomers/gen Xers watching in horror as young ’uns give their lengthy coffee orders to baristas. And on the latter explaining basic mobile phone functions to them. And on the former reacting like Victorian dowagers when they hear a word like “chatbot” or “Zoom”. Someone needs to tell them that Allison/Shields is 61, not 106. She would know what cancelling someone means and that it is not done by an annoyed woman shouting “I cancel you!” at another.
The whole thing is thin, lazy, and so disappointing. It could have been fine – maybe even good. The setup has perfectly legitimate dramedy potential, with each of the two main characters having what the other lacks in terms of skills, experience, and attitude. With a little effort, a little genuine wit, intergenerational stuff can be fun, funny, and occasionally even illuminating. Shields can do comedy, but here she is thrown back on shrillness and interminably hamming it up to try to make things stick. Williamson is clearly capable of much more, too, but Andi is written mostly as an arrogant brat and there is nowhere really to take her.
Hope for the second season
Despite the flaws, the show has just enough charm and enough goodwill attached to Shields that the news it has been commissioned for a second series is greeted with hope rather than despair. The hope is that it will improve, like it did – slightly – between pilot and subsequent episodes, and become the Gilmore Girls-inflected, Murder, She Wrote homage it once flickeringly promised to be. But they do say that it’s the hope, at least as often as poisoned EpiPens, that kills you. You’re Killing Me aired on U&Drama and is on U.
