Bob’s Burgers and Murder Mysteries: Comfort TV as an Art Form

Every night I watch Bob’s Burgers to fall asleep. I’ve never been good at laying quietly in the dark. I tend to start thinking about death after about one minute of silence. Bob’s, and its talented voice actors, lull me into complacent sleep. Bob’s Burger’s is a gentle, animated comedy about a family of sweet weirdos and their underappreciated burger restaurant. I could, and many have, extoll its virtues (and discuss its flaws), but I want to praise it for what I’ve been calling “anti-realism:” fiction that creates its own world with its own rules—a world that shares some DNA with the real world, but is not in our universe. It’s not fantasy, going by genre conventions, because there is no magic or supernatural elements, but neither is it straight realism. (I’m pretty sure there is another, actual definition for anti-realism, but this is what I’m calling this concept for now. Let me know if you have a better term!)

Bob’s Burgers world is a world where cell phones exist, but Tina’s middle school is not governed by social media. Where fourth graders hang out with eighth graders relatively peacefully. Where every new character the Belcher family encounters in the colorful tourist town they live in is some kind of weirdo—sometimes rude or bizarre, but never cruel or violent (besides the occasional comedic fisty-cuffs.) Bob and Linda are excellent, creative, empathetic parents, and the stakes of their adventures are never very high. 

 That is not to say that Bob’s Burgers isn’t without conflict or stratification—the premise of the show is explicitly about class. The Belchers are a working-class family who live in an apartment above their restaurant, and they work themselves to exhaustion to afford rent to the gentle, silly villain of the show—their landlord Mr. Fischoeder. Anti-realism, as I’m thinking of it, doesn’t mean a world in which the harshness of the real world doesn’t exist at all, but just a world with different rules. I happen to love Bob’s Burgers because the rules are specific, gentle, and delightful. There is nothing wrong about wanting your fiction to delight. 

Anti-realism can also be created through structure and genre. Bob’s is the kind of cartoon that has built in time-wobbliness: no one ever ages, although characters do grow and change just a little. At first, I was bothered by this. I worried that my favorite characters were locked in a kind of purgatory. But my husband said he likes to think of each season of Bob’s as an alternate universe: many different variations of a year in the life of this family. Thus, it narratively escapes the pain of time passing, and people growing old.

This re-setting, repetitive structure is why I am obsessed with mysteries, specifically “cozy” mysteries. I love this wonderful article about Murder She Wrote in Electric Literature by Hannah Berger, where she argues that why she finds Murder She Wrote so comforting is because of the amnesia of the structure. Each episode Jessica Fletcher solves a new murder, seemingly forgetting the numerous other murders she has already solved, never wondering why her life is besieged by so much death. I was struck by this observation because it so succinctly expressed why I find murder mysteries so comforting, despite them being about, you know, murder. Because of the re-setting structure, murder mysteries, as a genre, are a kind of anti-realism. They exist in a world full of murder, but the murders do not pile up. Even in slightly more serious mystery shows, like Vera for example, the characters are not weighed down by the harsh violence of their world, as they would be in ours. Thus, they are comforting: a vehicle for character work, comedy, fun settings, and mystery-solving. 

Due to pandemic despair, I have spent the last several months watching numerous cozy murder mysteries, often with a jigsaw puzzle as accompaniment. I have been inspired by the genre, and by my musings about realism, anti-realism, and gentleness and comfort in storytelling. I have been writing some new stories inspired by the murder mystery genre, and that play with genre and structure in general, which I hope I can share soon. 

 Until then, see below for a list of cozy mysteries if you too want to escape into that world. If you do, I recommend a subscription to Acorn and BritBox. Also please give the article, In Praise of “Murder She Wrote,” My Pandemic Lullaby by Hannah Berger a read, it’s excellent. 

My favorite cozy mysteries recently (mostly British and Australian), listed most cozy to most realistic: 

 Agatha Raisin 

Queens of Mystery 

Miss Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries 

Death In Paradise

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries 

McDonald and Dodds 

My Life Is Murder 

Murdoch Mysteries 

Vera