The quiet English countryside of Midsomer County might seem like a peaceful place to live, but in Midsomer Murders, Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby (John Nettles) and his assistant Sergeant Troy (Daniel Casey) have their hands full with various murderous mysteries.

Midsomer Murders has been successful as a series, now in its sixth season; Midsomer Murders Set 1 marks its first appearance on DVD. Oddly, though, while the packaging declares that this is "Set 1", the four episodes presented here are not from the show's first season. Three of the episodes come from the second season, while one is from the third season. For new viewers, this produces a very disconcerting effect, as there are many references to past mysteries solved; more significantly, there's no real introduction of the detective character and his family, which adds to the confusion of characters.

Four episodes are included in this set, each running 100 minutes. In "Death's Shadow," a series of seemingly unrelated murders leads Barnaby to find a deadly thirty-year-old secret. In "Strangler's Wood," the body of an unknown woman is found strangled to death in the same place where three other women had been killed years earlier. "Blood Will Out" the town of Martyr Warren is disrupted by feuding groups of travelers, and in "Beyond the Grave" a series of incidents near the Aspern Tallow museum seems to be supernatural in origin, leaving Barnaby and Troy to separate fact from fiction.

The series is loosely based on a set of novels by Caroline Graham, which explains to a certain extent the welter of characters in each episode. Relationships and characters that were most likely presented with sufficient detail in the novel get shorter shrift in the 100-minute episodes, with the result that the program feels top-heavy with characters whose interconnections are barely touched on (but that the audience is expected to remember). In this set, "Death's Shadow" is based on a Graham novel, while the others are original to the series.

Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby isn't a terrible protagonist, but neither is he a particularly captivating one; "bland" might be the best word to describe him. He's the sort of character who you might like to have as your neighbor in real life, but on screen he's fairly colorless. It may be because of that nondescript impression that it seems he doesn't really do much by way of detecting in the episodes; the stories seem to simply unfold around him, rather than becoming clear due to his police work.

One failing of the Midsomer Murders episodes is their lack of surprises; somehow the resolution of the mysteries never seems to pack much of a punch. It's possible to figure out the mystery mainly from the manner in which the various characters are introduced, and their role in the story. For instance, we know straight away that the most likely suspect is the one character who absolutely is not the criminal. I always enjoy trying to actively figure out "whodunit?" while I'm watching a mystery program, but Midsomer Murders is rather unrewarding in that respect, because I found myself treating meta-elements, like the way the story is being told, as clues, rather than the clues presented in the actual story itself.

The DVD

Video

The episodes here appear in a "letterboxed" 1.66:1 aspect ratio image. It does look a lot like a 1.33:1 image, except for the clue of the thin black bar at the bottom of the screen, but the important thing is that these episodes are, in fact, presented in their original, correct aspect ratio. The image quality is adequate but certainly could be better. Skin tones lean slightly toward the reddish, and colors overall don't quite have the life to them that they ought to. A substantial amount of edge enhancement is visible, along with a moderate amount of noise in some scenes.

Audio

The Dolby 2.0 audio is satisfactory. Dialogue is clear most of the time, though on a few occasions I found some lines to be muffled. The overall sound is a bit better than average, offering a decent balance of dialogue, music, and environmental sounds, but not always as clean-sounding as it could be.

Extras

Just a few minor special features are included here. On each disc in the set there's the same map of Midsomer County and biography of Caroline Graham, along with cast filmographies.

Final thoughts

Midsomer Murders has a fairly strong following, judging from the fact that the series is currently still running and in its sixth year, so fans of the show on television will be pleased to see its debut on DVD. This set isn't a good starting point for new viewers, though, because rather unaccountably this "Set 1" actually contains episodes from the series' second and third seasons, in which we're already assumed to be familiar with the characters. It's a reasonable choice as a rental for new viewers, and a purchase for fans of the show.