In this male version of Murder, She Wrote, Edward Woodward (The Equalizer) is a best-selling mystery writer who gets out from behind his word processor to solve murders. Because CBS doesn't want just the older-viewer demographics of Murder, She Wrote, however, Woodward has been paired with an attractive young woman (Jessica Lundy), a San Francisco reporter who is his partner in crime-solving. She's as bubbly and fast-talking as he is cranky and lugubrious (throughout, Woodward talks like Michael Caine with a chicken-bone stuck in his throat).
The pilot episode of Over My Dead Body tries to be funny by repeating every joke at least three times — Lundy's character has a cold, and keeps sneezing in people's faces; everybody Woodward meets tells him his latest book stinks. At one point, Woodward's editor, hoping to coax a best-seller out of this petulant, exhausted excuse for a series hero, advises him, ''Grit is in, slick is out.'' Over My Dead Body is neither; it's clumsy and boring. D
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