Mysteries and Reality TV

I gotta tell you, I love mysteries. I especially love a subgenre known as cozy mysteries, which is where your protagonist (i.e. mystery solver) is not in a line of work that typically solves mysteries (such as a cop or a detective). They can be little old women, journalists, bakers, writers, cat sitters, teenaged girls…

Anyway. I love the subgenre a lot, and am always willing to give a potentially interesting series a chance.

So when I heard about Whodunnit, a murder mystery reality television series, I thought, “This sounds like something I’d like.”

Whodunnit takes 13 random people, sticks them in a mansion, and kills them off, one by one. The surviving contestants have to solve riddles and examine crime scenes to solve the mystery of the latest death. Those that do the best job of putting together the facts are safe; those who present wrong facts or fail to figure things out are warned, and one of those becomes the next victim.

There’s the added twist that one of the thirteen is the “killer.”

(While it is a murder mystery show, they are, of course, not actually killing people. At the end of each episode, the “murdered” contestant, still bedecked in whatever make-up was necessary for their grisly demise, leaves a message for the survivors and the audience. I guess in case people were worried that they were actually watching people die.)

The first couple of episodes were very reality-TV-y. I mean, I don’t watch a lot of TV, and I watch even less of the reality kind (my preference being for the occasional ghost hunting show or SyFy’s FaceOff), but you know what I mean. Catty fighting, trying to make other people look bad, random bragging. Basically the reason some people watch reality TV and others don’t.

And obviously the mystery solving isn’t organic because they’ve add in a riddle system to it to give the show a format to follow. So it’s part reality TV show, part game show, part murder mystery.

And despite the fact that most of the contestants come across as, well, reality TV show participants, the murder mystery part is pretty cool. The murders are pretty complex and are getting more interesting as the show goes on.

So, the verdict? I’ll keep watching for now. But, for next season, I’d like to see them stick on someone a little more genre-friendly. Like a mystery writer, maybe. I think it’d be really cool to see someone who’s familiar with the tropes work through things.

Anyone else watching Whodunnit? Got any cozy mystery series (TV or book) to recommend to me?