"So much for the holly tree." - Laura Thyme (Pam Ferris) after a murder attempt sends the victim's car careening into a tree
Rosemary & Thyme: Series One DVD Review
By A.J. Carson
Rosemary Boxer (Felicity Kendal) is professor of horticulture who has recently been fired from her position as a university lecturer by her duplicitous ex-boyfriend. Laura Thyme (Pam Ferris) is a former police officer who spends her days happily puttering around her garden until her husband leaves her for a "twenty-three year-old tart." Together, they are the crime fighting duo Rosemary & Thyme, digging up clues and bringing murderers to justice as they plant begonias and tidy up hedgerows. Sounds wacky? And I didn't even mention the show's theme song which samples "Scarborough Fair" ("parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme."). No, this isn't a clever sketch from a PBS version of Saturday Night Live but an actual 2003 British mystery series now arriving on DVD in Rosemary & Thyme: Series One.
The series combines the twin British obsessions of gardening and mysteries, like an odd mix of Ground Force and Murder, She Wrote. In each episode, the team is hired to revitalize a garden or solve a botanical problem, like sap-oozing trees or diseased tomato plants. Wherever they happen to be working, Laura and Rosemary attract murder like the underside of fingernails attracts potting soil. Using their investigative and horticultural skills, the two pals solve the cases while deciding where to plant irises or whether waterlilies are appropriate in a decorative waterfall (they aren't - they prefer still waters).
In the series' first season, the pals investigate six mysteries:
And No Birds Sing: Rosemary Boxer and Laura Thyme meet when a mutual acquaintance dies in an auto accident. As they bond over a magnificent estates ailing trees - and their own troubles with men - the two stumble across a highly poisonous plant, a mysterious housekeeper, and a possible murder scheme.
Arabica and the Early Spider: Pop singer Nev Connolly (Murray Head) hires Rosemary and Laura to design the gardens at his new country estate. Locals insist that the house is cursed, and a string of strange events - fires, faulty scaffolding, the discovery of a buried horse skeleton - lend credibility to the rumors. But when Nev is shot in the garden one night, it is up to Rosemary and Thyme to find out if he's fallen victim to the curse, or if his murder is somehow related to the human skeleton found buried near where the singer was shot.
The Language of Flowers: When the owner of a luxury spa is murdered, Rosemary and Laura help to crack the case by deciphering a secret message embedded in the decorative flowers surrounding a dormant garden waterfall.
Sweet Angelica: While investigating patches of dead grass at a language institute, Laura and Rosemary encounter a really bad - and equally dead - weed: a loutish handyman who was often a bit too hands-on with the school's female students.
A Simple Plot: Rosemary comes to the aid of her former mentor - a blind, retired professor - after his communal garden plot is stricken with blight. When the professor dies while tending his garden, the police rule it a freak accident. Laura and Rosemary, however, have their doubts.
The Tree of Death: When someone is impaled by an arrow in the churchyard garden Laura and Rosemary have been hired to cultivate, even the vicar is a suspect.
The interplay between the show's two leads is appealing, and the actresses have a knack for easy banter. After discovering the separately buried skeletons of a horse and a young woman in "Arabica and the Early Spider," for example, the two theorize on how the corpses may have come to be buried on the once-abandoned estate:
Rosemary: Suppose the woman was the trainer's daughter, or his wife, and she's riding the horse and there's an accident and the horse dies. And then, rather than admitting it to her husband, or her father, she buries it. And then, overcome with guilt, she commits suicide.
Laura: Then, overcome with tidiness, she buries herself?
Rosemary: That is so unnecessary. Just because I haven't worked out all the details yet.
Unfortunately, this sense of humor isn't displayed often enough in Rosemary & Thyme. The show's premise is faintly ridiculous, and acknowledgement of such would be highly welcomed. More often than not, though, the series insists on taking itself far too seriously.
Enlivening the humor would also help disguise the fact that the series' mysteries aren't very engaging. The cases aren't as intricately plotted as those in series like Marple. The murder method in "A Simple Plot" is reasonably clever, but only the most inattentive of viewers will miss the heavy-handed clues that give away the secret in the scenes leading up to the murder.
The series' biggest flaw, however, is its overall geriatric feel. Rosemary & Thyme's two stars could present viewers with portraits of vibrant, middle-age women. Instead, the show feels downright elderly and out of touch. Geraldine McEwan's Miss Marple is decades older than Rosemary and Laura, but Marple is infused with spry, youthful energy. As a series, Rosemary & Thyme has a dowdiness that even a dishy babe like Kendal cannot overcome.
The six episodes that make up the first series are divided onto three discs. The discs are housed in three standard-sized keepcases which slide into a cardboard slipcover. The back of each keepcase includes brief synopses of the episodes found on the DVDs.
The menus are simple and functional. Viewers can choose to watch an entire episode or can jump directly to a scene using the "Scene Selection" menu.
