This ‘Murder, She Wrote' Festival Might Be Exactly What We Need Now
Something magical happens when nostalgia becomes a destination. Not just a feeling you stumble into while scrolling through old memories, but a place you drive hours through coastal redwoods to reach, pay money to enter and spend a weekend marinating in alongside hundreds of strangers who feel exactly the way you do about, say, a particular woman of a certain age on a 1980s TV show who solved mysteries every week. In 2026, that particular kind of story about the sharp, unassuming woman who outwits everyone is having a moment again. But for the fans who never stopped watching, it didn't ever really go away.
"Murder mysteries thrive in popularity in troubling times," said Tim Benzie, an Australian performer living in the U.K. whose Solve-Along-a-Murder-She-Wrote show has become a fixture of a Murder, She Wrote festival in Mendocino, California. That instinct of Benzie's is just what the festival, now in its third year, runs on. The event draws fans of the beloved CBS mystery series that starred Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher to the tiny northern California coastal town that served as the exterior backdrop for the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove throughout the show's 12-season run. The festival is a fundraiser for the Kelley House Museum, Mendocino's local history nonprofit, and it is organized by the museum's director, Anne Semans, who stumbled into the whole thing almost by accident.
"It started with a tribute to Angela when she died [in 2022]," Semans said. "The next year we just changed the name to the Murder, She Wrote Festival to see if anyone would come, and we had no idea this fanbase existed."
They found out quickly. The festival, intentionally capped at a few hundred attendees due to the town's limited infrastructure, sells out fast. Events include trivia, a costume ball held inside the building that served as the show's library, a scavenger hunt through local shops and the now-legendary Jessica Jog, in which participants don blonde wigs and gray sweatsuits to replicate Lansbury's iconic opening credits look.
This intimacy is both a byproduct of its location and also by design, almost mirroring something essential about the show itself. Unlike going to the movies, television is a domestic art form. It happens in your living room, often with people you love, and it becomes stitched into our collective memory in ways that are deeply personal and often emotional. At the festival, that intimacy shows up constantly, sometimes in ways that stop you cold.
"Someone said, ‘I just want to thank you for doing this,'" Semans recalled a festivalgoer telling her. "[They said], ‘I watched it with my grandmother. I found out I was diagnosed with cancer this year. I need to get a mastectomy, and I'm postponing it until after the festival.'"
That is not a typical Comic-Con story. And Murder, She Wrote was never a typical show. (How many other shows about a widowed, retired English teacher-turned-celebrated-mystery-author who had the remarkable misfortune of stumbling across a dead body virtually everywhere she went, do you know?) It ran from 1984 to 1996, not to mention several made-for-TV movies, and continues to air on cable and streaming today.
Digital Comfort Food
The people who love the show do so with an almost molecular intensity. Two people who have seen this firsthand are Michael Horton and Debbie Zipp, the married actors who played Grady Fletcher and his girlfriend Donna on the series. They discovered the festival online after its first year, reached out to Semans and were invited to attend last year. The reception they received floored them.
"The room went absolutely crazy," Zipp said, remembering the moment she and Horton stood up during trivia and fans realized who they were. "People were tearing up. We just went, what on earth?"
Both actors describe the fan response in terms of comfort, a word that came up again and again over the course of the weekend. "Comfort food [is what] this show is," Horton said, "it's macaroni and cheese and hot dogs. It makes you feel good." Zipp hears the same thing from fans of all ages: "The word we kept hearing all the time, last year, this year: comfort."
That appetite for comfort is not accidental, and it harkens back to Benzie's theory about murder mysteries thriving during difficult times.
"Before, during and after World War I and World War II, whodunits were really popular. And I think there's absolutely a boom happening in murder mysteries as a genre," he said. He traces the current wave to early 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns turned the world into something that felt uncomfortably like a closed-room mystery scenario.
Zipp sees Murder, She Wrote as ground zero for this genre. "This is the beginning of the genre in America, as the cozy murder mystery with a woman," she said. And that template-inspired by Agatha Christie's Miss Marple-has proven durable: from The Good Wife-spinoff Elsbeth starring Carrie Preston to the recent Matlock reboot, which reimagined the classic legal procedural with Kathy Bates as a sharp, older woman who gets perpetually underestimated. (Notably, all three share the same network: CBS.) The appetite for this particular kind of story, centered on unconventional female crime solvers, has never really gone away. In fact, it just keeps finding new audiences.
Nostalgia, in other words, is not merely sentimental. It is a coping mechanism, sure, but also an increasingly marketable one. And the renewed appetite for cozy crime is about to get a significant injection: a Murder, She Wrote film is in development for 2028, with Oscar-winner Jamie Lee Curtis set to star as Jessica Fletcher. As you might imagine, the announcement has generated some ambivalence among the faithful, but Semans, for one, is enthusiastic.
"I think she'll be so respectful of Angela's intentions and the legacy that the show has left," Semans said. "My dream is that she will come to the festival one day."
The broader consensus, even among the skeptics, is that whatever the film does for the franchise, it will send people back to the original. New fans will discover it. Old fans will revisit it. And some of them will eventually find their way up the Pacific Coast Highway to a small town that smells like sea air and redwoods, ready to jog in a blonde wig for a woman who, as Horton put it simply, just made you feel good.
Lansbury never saw the festival that grew up in her show's wake. But Semans keeps historic photographs of the actress shooting the show in town on display at the Kelley House Museum.
"I picture her smiling at us," Semans said. "I think she's here for it, 100 percent."
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This story was originally published May 13, 2026 at 2:00 AM.