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Midsomer Murders is a British Mystery fiction television series, adapted by Anthony Horowitz and Douglas Watkinson from the novels in the Chief Inspector Barnaby book series created by Caroline Graham. It has been broadcast on the ITV network since its premiere on 23 March 1997. The series focuses on various murder cases that take place within small country villages across the fictional English county of Midsomer, and the efforts of the senior police detective and his partner within the fictional Midsomer Constabulary to solve the crime by determining who the culprit is and the motive for their actions. It differs from other detective dramas in featuring a mixture of lighthearted whimsy and dark humour, as well as a notable soundtrack with a title theme that includes a theremin.
The programme has featured two lead stars: from its premiere in 1997, John Nettles as Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Tom Barnaby, until his retirement from the drama in February 2011; then Neil Dudgeon as DCI John Barnaby, Tom's younger cousin, since March 2011. Both main stars have featured a list of supporting actors who worked alongside them, including Jane Wymark, Barry Jackson, Daniel Casey, John Hopkins, Jason Hughes, Gwilym Lee, and Nick Hendrix. Midsomer Murders remains a popular feature in British television schedules and has been broadcast internationally in over 200 countries and territories.
Anthony Horowitz and the original producers, Betty Willingale and Brian True-May, created the series. Horowitz adapted the majority of the early episodes from the original works by Caroline Graham. Current writers include Helen Jenkins, Jeff Povey, Nicholas Hicks-Beach, Julia Gilbert and Maria Ward.
Initially John Nettles acted in the role of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. Nettles' character retired at the end of 2010, after the 13th series of eight episodes; his last episode was "Fit for Murder". Neil Dudgeon replaced him in the 14th series, playing Tom Barnaby's cousin, DCI John Barnaby, who was seen in a series 13 episode, "The Sword of Guillaume". Dudgeon made his first appearance in Midsomer Murders in the series 4 episode "Garden of Death", in which he played the role of a tongue-in-cheek gardener, Daniel Bolt, rather interested in sex.
Series 20 began in the UK on ITV on 10 March 2019, with episode 1, "The Ghosts of Causton Abbey". In the US, the entire six-episode series was immediately released on the streaming services Acorn TV and BritBox, and became available on Netflix after the UK broadcast schedule had finished. The show was removed from Netflix in October 2019; only the first 19 series had been shown on the service. Series 20 onward have never been shown on Netflix in US or Canada. As of January, 2021, series 1–20 can be seen in the US on IMDb TV and Tubi TV.
The show's official social media confirmed that production of series 21 began in March 2019. As with series 20, series 21 was initially released in the USA. It premiered on Acorn TV and BritBox on 1 December 2019, before airing in the UK in January 2020.
Published in "The Cinemaholic" in Aug 2024, they have "learned that the network has joined Acorn TV to renew Midsomer Murders for its twenty-fifth season. The instalment’s filming began in the United Kingdom in the spring of 2025."
In October 2025, ITV announced that a 26th series had been commissioned.
Many of the villages and small towns of the county have the word "Midsomer" in their name; this is inspired in part by the real county of Somerset, and specifically, its actual town of Midsomer Norton, and became a naming convention within the show. Midsomer Wellow and Causton are derived from the names of real Somerset villages Wellow and Corston.
Each episode usually contains several murders, the high body count being a well-known feature of the show. Despite this, the culprit is almost never a serial killer—very frequently the murderer is driven by circumstance to compound his or her crimes, and keeps killing to cover up the original murder.
Humour is a main feature of the series. There is often dark comedy, such as a woman being murdered with a wheel of cheese, and many scenes are examples of "dramedy" (comic drama or dramatic comedy). According to Radio Times when describing the episode "Death and the Divas" (series 15, episode 4): " Midsomer Murders never takes itself too seriously but here it's got its tongue so far into its cheek, it hurts."
Nostalgia has also been a feature of the show, especially in its Nettles era. Most episodes have been set in rural villages of a kind that were already changing rapidly by the time the series began, Nettles opined in a 2003 interview. The old-fashioned settings are true to the Graham novels: "Although the books are set in the present", wrote one reviewer, Graham's country villages "seem to come from another time". "The spirit is obviously of the '50s", Nettles remarked, and the less crowded, less complicated village/world was clearly part of the books' appeal.
The Six Bells, a pub in Warborough, Oxfordshire, repeatedly features as the Black Swan in the Midsomer village of Badger's Drift. The Bull & Butcher, the village pub in Turville, Buckinghamshire, featured in both "Murder on St. Malley's Day" (renamed as The Chalk and Gown) and in "Schooled in Murder" (renamed as The Spotted Cow).
Filming took place on Sunday 11 August 2013 at White Waltham Airfield, southwest of Maidenhead, for episode 4 of Series 16, "The Flying Club".
The Buckinghamshire tourism authority announced in 2021 the launching of three themed tours of locations in the county that have been used to film the series.
In "The Killings of Copenhagen" – number five in the sixteenth series and the 100th episode overall – several scenes are filmed on location in central Copenhagen, like Rådhuspladsen ("the City Hall Square"), Nyhavn ("New Port") with its canal and old colourful houses, a Danish countryside church, and at the circular courtyard inside the Copenhagen Police Headquarters building.Picture of the round "police square" and some of the episode's main actors at midsomermurders.org . The murder in Copenhagen is one of three within the entire series (until episode 114, at least) that take place outside the fictional county of Midsomer, the others being in Wales where DCI Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) and DS Ben Jones (Jason Hughes) travel in "Death and Dust" and Brighton where Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) is introduced.
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Entitled Midsomer Murders – 25 Years of Mayhem it featured contributions from cast members including John Nettles, Neil Dudgeon, Jane Wymark, Fiona Dolman, Daniel Casey, Jason Hughes and Annette Badland, as well as writer Jeff Povey and producer Ian Strachan. It also delved behind the scenes of filming series 23 and highlighted pre-fame appearances by actors such as Orlando Bloom and Henry Cavill.
ITV subsequently announced that the one-hour documentary would air on the channel on Sunday 29 May 2022 at 7pm.
True-May's replacement, Jo Wright, confirmed that she was committed to on-screen diversity when she took over the helm, saying: "I feel strongly that a range of ethnic groups should be represented on screen. And that will be reflected in some of the episodes in the new series with key guest casting. I will cast the series in the same way as I always do, by starting with the best script. And a good script will include a variety of different characters." In series 15, Asian actors played central characters for the first time, in the episode "Written in the Stars". Black characters also began to appear starting in that series. Beginning with series 18, the show gained an Asian member for its main cast: pathologist Kam Karimore, played by Manjinder Virk. However, she left at the end of series 19.
In Australia, first-run episodes and repeats are screened on the national free-to-air network ABC with repeats also shown on the Nine Network channel, 9Gem. The series was originally only aired on the Nine Network. Repeat screenings are also aired on the subscription channels UKTV and 13th Street. A measure of the success of the series in Australia is that repeats of the series still rate highly and often feature in the nation's top twenty shows in national surveys.
In Canada, the series is broadcast on TVOntario and Book Television in Ontario, on Knowledge in British Columbia, and via American PBS channels available throughout southern parts of Canada. , the first thirteen series are currently available in Canada on Amazon Prime Video, while only series 21 is available on Britbox. The first nineteen series are also available on streaming service/app Tubi and Acorn.
In Ireland, the series is aired on Virgin Media Three every Monday night at 8 pm. It is one of the channel's highest-rated shows.
In New Zealand, the series was broadcast on TVNZ 1 and it was broadcast for a number of years on the free-to-air channel Prime.
In the United States, the series was first aired by A&E, which broadcast "The Killings at Badger's Drift" on 28 June 1998 and followed with the next four episodes over the 1998–99 series. The show remained on A&E for many years until it was syndicated by American Public Television for broadcast on public television stations. All 24 series are currently available on the streaming service Acorn TV, which also offers the programme in Canada. The show was also broadcast on Ion Mystery and is currently on Ion Plus, and it has a dedicated channel on the streaming service Pluto TV.
The Paramount Channel broadcasts episode reruns daily.
PBS also occasionally shows Midsomer Murders on some stations from time to time.
The closing theme for "The Scarecrow Murders", shown on 29 May 2022 to celebrate 25 years, was a more jovial clarinet version.
Multiple soundtrack CDs have been released so far, containing versions of the theme and musical cues from various series.
Note that episodes 1 to 100 were originally released as 25 DVD "sets", which were not in chronological order and are now discontinued. They have been re-released in 2015 as a chronological "series" 1 to 16 in redesigned packages. To confuse fans further, Costco Warehouses sold 5 abbreviated (region 1) sets with one less disc, but used the same "set" numberings even though they did not match the retail "sets".
Blue-ray discs were released for "Sets" 17 through 25 and "Series" 16 through 24, picking up where the "sets" left off but not re-issuing the "sets" in redesigned packages like the DVDs did.
In January 2006, Midsomer Murders started a DVD and Magazine Collection, available at newsagents in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK.
Acorn Media had released DVD chronological order collections of Midsomer Murders in North America, which are:
Below table are the release dates for complete series sets in both Australia Region 4 and the United Kingdom Region 2.
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