by Chris Harris
There was a time when Inspector Morse was not just watched, it was anticipated. Sunday evenings were quietly organised around it. It was one of those rare programmes that felt like a shared national pause, serious television that assumed its audience wanted to think and trusted them to keep up. In an era before long-winded 3-star bingeing and box sets, Morse arrived as an event. Slow, intelligent, literary, unapologetically English. John Thaw’s Morse was a rarity, a detective who quoted poetry, drank real ale, listened to Wagner, and despised modernity with a curmudgeonly elegance that felt earned rather than affected. And, my oh my, the viewing figures regularly brought in 18 million viewers per episode in the mid-1990s.
Rewatching the series now, though, a different question inevitably arises. Has Inspector Morse actually stood the test of time, and was it one of the moments when crime drama began shifting its focus away from the puzzle itself and towards the person solving it? Morse sits at an interesting junction in television history, one foot firmly planted in the traditional whodunnit, the other edging towards something more psychologically layered, where the inner life of the detective begins to matter almost as much as the crime.
John Thaw’s performance remains the series’ greatest strength. Morse is arrogant, emotionally clumsy, snobbish, sexist, and frequently wrong, and crucially, the programme usually knows this. He is not offered up as a heroic ideal but as a deeply flawed man, clever, lonely, and increasingly out of step with the world around him, but a beautiful vintage Jaguar! In that sense, Morse already felt like a relic even when the series first aired, and that self awareness is what allows the character to age better than he otherwise might. More importantly, it signals a subtle but important shift in the genre. Inspector Morse still delivers intricate crimes, but it also asks us to spend time understanding the man investigating them. We are no longer just invited to work out who committed the murder, but to consider who Morse is, why he behaves as he does, and how his prejudices, disappointments, and habits shape his judgement. That move, from pure puzzle solving towards character study, would go on to define much of modern crime drama. It was also one of the factors that brought in the vast number of viewers, because the character examination was subtle, nowadays it is tediously overworked and takes far too much attention.
What has dated more noticeably is the world Morse inhabits. Oxford in Inspector Morse is not so much a living city as a carefully curated fantasy. Empty quads, echoing cloisters, manicured lawns, and a conspicuous absence of ordinary life. It exists largely to flatter Morse’s sensibilities, tradition, hierarchy, and a quiet disdain for the present, and in doing so, it aligns intelligence almost exclusively with cultural elitism. Knowledge is classical, literary, academic. Working class characters are more often suspects than scholars. Gender too is an area where the series strains under modern scrutiny. Morse’s relationships with women are frequently patronising, melancholic, or idealised, and while his failures are usually framed as his own, the emotional assumptions belong firmly to another era. These limitations matter because once the detective becomes the story, the values he embodies are no longer incidental. They are part of what we are being asked to engage with, and to judge.
Despite all this, Inspector Morse retains something many contemporary crime dramas lack, a confidence in slowness. It trusts silence. It allows scenes to breathe. It assumes the audience is capable of patience and thought. In a television landscape now dominated by relentless pacing and exhaustive backstory, Morse feels almost restrained. Which brings us back to the larger question the series poses in hindsight. Was this the point at which crime drama began shifting from who did it to who is doing it and why? If so, has that shift been an unqualified improvement?
Modern television gives us detectives whose personal lives, traumas, addictions, and moral failures often dominate the narrative, sometimes to the extent that the crime itself becomes secondary. Inspector Morse sits at an earlier, more balanced stage of that evolution. The mystery still matters, but character has begun to intrude, deepen, and complicate it. Perhaps that is why the series still endures. Not because it is flawless, progressive, or timeless, but because it captures a moment of transition, both in television and in the kind of stories we decided we wanted to tell. A moment when the detective first stepped out from behind the crime and became the story himself.
#TV Drama #Inspector Morse #Crime Fiction #TV Review #Whodunnit
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