11 Facts About Angela Lansbury's Hit Show Murder, She Wrote

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

"Murder, She Wrote" ended its run on CBS in 1996 after 12 seasons. It enjoyed unexpected success for 11 of those years, but CBS's decision to change its time slot badly hurt its ratings, a development satirized in the series finale (via The Washington Post). The end of the series wasn't the end of Jessica Fletcher, though. The first of many TV movies to be produced under the "Murder, She Wrote" banner and starring Angela Lansbury premiered in 1997 (per The New York Times).

Lansbury was always disappointed with the way "Murder, She Wrote" ended, according to Entertainment Weekly. Years after the series and the movies were done, she hoped to bring Fletcher and Cabot Cove back to the small screen. "I sort of do see it happening when I'm in a dream state," she said in 2011. Just three years later, however, Lansbury publicly reconsidered. When asked about a "Murder, She Wrote" revival by Zap2it, she confessed that she felt too old for the part. While Fletcher could be portrayed as an elderly woman, Lansbury felt it was best to keep the memory of her as middle-aged and robust. "I'm still pretty vigorous," she insisted, "but if I wanted to transform myself back into the woman I looked like then, it would be ridiculous. And I can't do that."

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