Unbelievably, I had suffered a stroke. My left leg and left arm were paralyzed, and I had difficulty speaking clearly. I was in a local hospital, trapped inside a body that had betrayed me, and it was extremely hard sometimes to get to sleep.

The television series was and is ongoing. Happily, I had and still have a little LG tablet, on which I meant to read Kindle books. But it's also "connected" to my family's Netflix account, and although the phrase "binge-watch" hadn't been coined yet, that's exactly what I did with the English detective series, propping the tablet up on my bedside tray, and letting it run all night. Some of the hospital staff thought that I was very strange. Others understood perfectly. Having the murmur of the little science-fictiony TV to get me through the endless night was extremely comforting, somehow.

The series is about Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, accompanied by various sidekicks over the years—starting with an eager but bumbling newbie, working with numerous others until he finds a competent and capable young Welsh constable to back him up—going about their business much like Sergeant Joe Friday and his partner, Frank Smith back in the 1950s, investigating crimes, chiefly murders, in the fictional county (in Britain, counties are like states) of Midsomer, a mostly rural area, dotted with dozens of small towns.