A QUIET LITTLE NEIGHBORHOOD, A PERFECT LITTLE MURDER. NBC, Made-for-TV, 1990. Teri Garr, Robert Urich, Susan Ruttan, Florence Stanley, Tom Poston, Jeffrey Tambor, Gail Edwards. Director: Anson Williams.

   I agree, it’s a corny title, and if you don’t, it’s still a mouthful, and did you see who the director is? Anson Williams will never live down his role as Potsie on Happy Days. To tell you the truth, though – and you were waiting for me to say this, weren’t you? – I enjoyed this movie.

   There have been quite a few mystery novels published in the last couple of years that have taken place in the suburbs, with bored housewives and/ or widows or widowers (or combinations thereof) doing the jobs solving mysteries they can’t convince the conventional authorities to do that they should be doing.

   And once a trend begins, can TV be far behind? When a newly married couple – committed activists both – move from the big city, inevitably but inexorably, they find themselves settling in and – while they both deny it – becoming (!) yuppies. Not to mention being parents of a three month old daughter. What brings a rekindled degree of excitement to the life of the wife is a conversation she overhears on the baby’s kiddie-com – a clown with a large red lightbulb for a nose. The clown is also a radio transmitted, sending baby cries to the parents’ room, or wherever the second clown is located.

   And the conversation concerns a murder about to be committed. Marsha, the wife (Teri Garr) somehow overhears it, but she cannot convince her husband Ross (Robert Urich) or the police detective (Alex Rocco) that she is not simply going bananas. Urich, who used to play Spenser, is also very good at pretending to be thickheaded, which is just exactly what his part requires.

   Otherwise, this has about the right amount of mystery and suspense, mixed with more than enough comedy, and a little bit of detection as well. I think the bit about Marsha selling housewares door-to-door to aid in her sleuthing activities has been swiped from somewhere else, however, and I don’t really see Tom Poston (one of the two main suspects) as a killer, not that I’m saying he was, in case this movie is ever rerun again, as it surely will be. (He’s described here by one of the other characters, as a “Mr. Potato Head,” and that’s as apt a description of the man and the parts he played as I’ve ever heard.)

– Mildly revised from Mystery*File 26, December 1990.