A feisty widow solves murders when she's not writing about them in her home town of Cabot Cove, Maine, a coastal community with a peculiarly high homicide rate. A Sunday-night staple on CBS, this hugely popular drama was Angela Lansbury's first regular series and earned the Tony and Golden Globe-winning actress an Emmy nomination (but never, unaccountably, the prize itself) for each of its 12 seasons. Lansbury later reprised her role as Jessica Fletcher in a series of TV-movies.