By Recently came the news that Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, the duo who penned this year’s GameStop stocks dramedy feature “Dumb Money,” will write a film adaptation of the 1980s/90s CBS murder mystery procedural series “Murder, She Wrote”.
In the series, the late, great Angela Lansbury starred in the lead role of Jessica Fletcher, a mystery novelist who lives in Maine and uses her skills at deduction to figure out the identity of the extraordinary number of murderers she encounters in her life.
The series ran for twelve seasons and saw her nominated for an Emmy every single year. Universal Television produced the series, which found a loyal audience and was seemingly only cancelled because of an unfortunate timeslot change in its final season.
Recently Blum and Angelo spoke with Slashfilm and were asked how they intend to go about bringing the Jessica Fletcher character into the 21st century.
Blum confirms they’re writing the project for Universal Pictures and that “Cabot Cove will be a big part of it, and Jessica. All the kind of fan favorites”. Angelo says:
“It’s been really fun to take a character who was constrained by the limits of broadcast television in the eighties and nineties – she’s not allowed to have too much depth, she’s not allowed to have an emotional arc, she’s certainly not allowed to make mistakes – and to imagine, in 2023, the possibilities of that character.
We would never dishonor Jessica Fletcher. In fact, the opposite. We have watched every episode two or three times. We know the ins and outs of that character and Cabot Cove. And the idea is to render that in three dimensions worthy of movie theater screens. [Its] a real event that people are going to put on their cardigans, hopefully, and go see.”
The pair say they both grew up watching the series with Blum saying they’ve been at the project for a while as it “has been the love of our lives for the last couple of years”. She also says: “I think we always credit curious women like Jessica Fletcher for why we became journalists initially.”
Previously NBC attempted to reboot the property nearly a decade ago with Octavia Spencer to play the lead who would not be named Jessica Fletcher and would be a hospital administrator and amateur sleuth blogger. That version was scrapped.
All twelve seasons of the original series are on Peacock. There is no word on when we might expect the movie, which is likely several years away.
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