Justice For Grady

This is my lament for Grady Fletcher. Poor, poor Grady Fletcher — who has, perhaps, one of the most jarring character arcs of anyone associated with Cabot Cove. May my words shed light on the wounds inflicted on him by the writer’s of Murder, She Wrote.

Grady makes his first appearance in the pilot episode, The Murder of Sherlock Holmes. We meet him as he is on the phone with Jessica, giving her the news of a lifetime. He read her manuscript, and — unbeknownst to her — he has gotten her a publishing deal. Grady Fletcher causes the inciting incident for the series. If not for him, there would be no books, and there certainly would be no Murder, She Wrote. This blog, the 2 point-and-click computer games, the board game, the Funko Pop!, none of it would have existed if not for Grady. And yet, despite his crucial role in the series, after the pilot episode, his character transforms into an unrecognizable husk of what it once was.

When we leave Grady at the end of the pilot, he is seemingly in love with his girlfriend, Kitty Donovan. So much so that his aunt warns him not to elope with her because Jessica wants to be invited to the wedding. After this, we meet Grady again in season one, episode 12, Broadway Malady, where he has a new job (remember this) and a new girlfriend (again, remember this). This episode marks the beginning of the end for Grady Fletcher as we knew him.

In the first shot of Grady in Broadway Malady, we get a hint at his new demeanor, though it will not be fully cemented until later episodes. He is on the phone with Jessica, and he is smiling like a schoolboy. He is giddy and excited, childlike in a way that wasn’t present in the pilot episode. Our second hint happens halfway through the episode, when he is distracted while cooking and a pot boils over on the stove. This at first may seem innocuous, but it is our first step towards Grady becoming the absent minded caricature he is destined to be.

Oh, and before we move on, by the end of Broadway Malady, Grady has switched his girlfriend out for a third girl, who he is just as in love with as he was with the previous one. Despite the fact that he was seemingly living with the old girlfriend, there is no need to be sad over lost love in Grady’s ever hopeful eyes.

By the third time Grady makes an appearance, his transformation has been completed. He was once a successful accountant in New York with a serious girlfriend and ties to major publishing houses. Now, as we see him in season 2, episode 12, Murder by Appoinment Only, he is a bachelor living paycheck to paycheck, creating elaborate schemes to impress someone into giving him a job and keeping his aunt from worrying about him. When we see him next in season 3, we learn that Grady only knows how to cook dishes that are tuna based, and he appears to still be unemployed and with a new love interest on the horizon. (He also spends this entire episode gaslighting his aunt, but that is for another day.)

I have to ask: Why? Why did they do this to such an important character? He was such a bright young man, and the writers took away the love of his young life and made him perpetually in search of employment. He became dumb. I mean quite literally, Grady is dumb. He is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Or at least, he isn’t by the end of season 2. The only reason I can think of for this rewrite is that, for whatever reason, the writers thought Grady didn’t have longevity as a character in his original iteration. Perhaps they felt that the only way to make him interesting enough to keep around was to make him constantly a damsel in distress for Jessica to save (or be annoyed by). This seems plausible, as there are countless other nieces of Jessica’s who never return to the show. Grady always returns, and so he has to have a raison d’etre. I suppose that has to be his chaos and lovable stupidity.

And I have to be honest: I love Grady’s character arc. I think it is unjustified and cruel what they have done to him, but I get so much amusement out of seeing just how cruel they will be to poor Grady. I light up every time he is on the screen because I have a sort of schadenfreude at this point. How will his name be tarnished today? How will those malevolent gods of screenwriting rake him through the coals this time? And they never fail to deliver. With every episode that features Grady, we are gifted another way in which he is simply a buffoon of a man.

I wish there had been a better outcome for Grady. I wish that he could have been written as the hero that he is. In my perfect world, Grady would have been like a sidekick to his aunt. Rather than constantly being arrested and falsely accused of murder, Grady would have been the Watson to Jessica’s Sherlock. But that is not who Grady became. He became the Barney Fife to Jessica’s Andy Taylor. And because I cannot rewrite the past, I will instead fix myself a bowl of popcorn and succumb to the joy that is watching the (unjust) downfall of Mr. Grady Fletcher.