Investigate this for me, would you?

I have written before about my weakness for true-crime television, which I still indulge from time to time. I'm getting to the point, though, where I recognize people on the Investigation Discovery ads that show clips from the programs, and that's never a good feeling. "Oh, I've seen this brutal murder before."

Anyway, last time I wrote about how the host of 48 Hours: Hard Evidence, Maureen Maher, is always narrating from some incipient crime scene (sometimes it's just a green-screen projection, I'm pretty sure) and asked: What's up with that? I still don't know, but every once in a while someone ends up here because they have the same question. So now I would like to bring up something else that's been bothering me -- and is another indicator that I'm spending too much time watching reruns of 48 Hours.

If you're Catholic, you probably know the Marty Haugen song "Shepherd Me, O God." It's a setting of the 23rd Psalm in very wide use in American Catholic parishes (and probably beyond). If you don't know it, it sounds like this. So here's the crazy part: more than once, while watching 48 Hours, I have heard them use this very Marty Haugen tune as spooky background music. And no, it doesn't just sound like "Shepherd Me, O God" (the way this one song the organist at my old parish used to play sounded just like "Frosty the Snowman" for the first few notes) -- it is "Shepherd Me, O God."

So here's my theory: the arrangement was originally used on a churchy episode of 48 Hours, one where the murdered person was a church cantor or something like that. And then they just kept using it, unaware that it would make every Catholic/churchgoing viewer go, "Wait, what?"

I don't know how plausible that is. All I really know is, they're using a tune by Marty Haugen as background music on 48 Hours, and I really hope he's getting paid, but I also wonder: Why would he give them permission to do that? Why would they even ask? Another possibility, I guess, is that the person who writes incidental music for 48 Hours accidentally "wrote" a song he'd heard at church. In which case, whoops, looks like there aren't enough Catholics behind the scenes at 48 Hours.

I also sometimes watch Dateline on ID, but one surefire way to get me to change the channel -- aside from the uncomfortable realization that I've seen this episode, and gawked at this murder, before -- is to air an episode featuring Keith Morrison. Man does that guy drive me up a wall. Which is why I was delighted to learn that Saturday Night Live has aired a number of sketches featuring Bill Hader as Keith Morrison.



Of course, like almost everything on SNL, the sketches are underwritten, and I'm annoyed at the way they degenerate into a gag about a guy who says "Ooooooo" and "Ohhhhhhh" a lot (because he doesn't, really). But they start out strong, and that impression is dead on. Rarely have I enjoyed a SNL sketch built around a cast member's random celebrity impression quite so much.