Michelle Yeoh, obvs https://twitter.com/mightygodking/status/1177268886661664768

Yeoh plays a mystery author whose brilliant, witty novels about a fictional female Tang dynasty magistrate have won her worldwide renown. In her spare time, she solves mysteries for friends who have heard that her talents transfer to real-life sleuthing. It's a natural.

Oh, wait, we need a thoroughline because we can't do purely episodic TV anymore. Okay. Jessica is (as in the original) a widow. We learn in the first few episodes that her husband, Frank, confessed after thirty years of marriage that he had been unfaithful to her with a friend.

Jessica, in a fury, left the house and went to Florence, where she happened to run into a past love from childhood, conveniently divorced. Jessica told this past love that she was divorced, too, and they had a quick fling that involved gelato.

While in the airport on her way back from Florence, Jessica got a call from a repentant Frank, asking whether they could reconcile. Torn, Jessica put him off.

At some time after she returned to the States, Frank died mysteriously. Possibly in a way inspired by one of her books.

Maybe Frank died by a thousand cuts? Is that too Hannibal? Anyway, Jessica is prey to conflicting emotions. She is offered a visiting writer gig at a big university and takes it. We'll call it Cabot University a) to imply that it is Harvard b) as a callback to the original show.

So while Jessica is solving all these murders she is also working through her feelings of betrayal, grief, and confusion and trying to avoid being drawn into the investigation of Frank's death. Maybe THAT is why she feels so compelled to assist her friends with their mysteries?

Unfortunately, Jessica's seeming indifference to her longtime spouse's grisly demise makes a lot of people think that she might have been involved in it somehow. And ON TOP of all this, her old love was not satisfied with Florence gelato sex and is trying to reenter J's life.

Under any other circumstances, Jessica would not be averse to reconnecting with her Old Flame, who will be played by someone distinguished-looking (Lawrence Fishburne?); however, she feels slightly guilty about having told him she was divorced when it was not technically true.

So she is juggling periodic sexy thoughts of Lawrence Fishburne while working through her grief about Frank (cameo by Greg Kinnear?) and solving a metric ton of murders, all while writing her new novel, which is starting to resemble her life in what may be a suspicious way...

Oh, and in the opening sequence, instead of AL banging away on a typewriter, we see MY using dual monitors to write the Chinese-language and English-language editions of her latest books simultaneously. The screens will show different text each episode, and will be clues.