Hollywood has been on a mystery binge. Now, pick a murder of your choice

The mystery story is a relatively recent innovation, whether dated from Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue," with its amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, or Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel "The Moonstone," which established many of the conventions still in use today, or even the 1887 debut of Sherlock Holmes, so popular that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, could not kill him. But the form has made up for lost time, with mystery series filling entire bookstores and invading every other storytelling platform — theater, film, radio and perhaps most prolifically, television, where it has held fast while other genres have come and gone. It's fantastically adaptable. Comedy, tragedy, cozy, gritty, formulaic, metafictional, historical, futuristic, highbrow, lowbrow, middle brow — something for every taste.

The advantage of a mystery, from a broadcaster or streamer's perspective, is that no matter the quality, viewers, once even a little invested, will stick around until the end just to find out who did it, or how they did it, or why they did it, even though the solution may be the least interesting aspect of the tale; often, if not inevitably, it will be a version of something you have seen before, there being a relatively few reasons people kill one another, and ways to do it, and to establish a phony alibi. This doesn't really matter much, because above all, a mystery is an armature on which to hang a bunch of distinct, disparate