The Romance of Cruise Ships: Dead Bodies

Despite enjoying The Love Boat, I don't really get the romance of cruise ships. I have no interest in taking a cruise myself--the first time someone told me, with great fondness, of meeting new people at "our dinner table," I thought, "Wow, that sounds like hell on floating water. Forced extroversion."

And no place to retreat. I love my tiny apartment with my cats. Unfortunately, cabins on cruise ships aren't meant as places of escape. 

And yet a lot of shows, from Quantum Leap to Murdoch Mysteries use the cruise ship to present closed environment problems. In sum, closed environment problems are the point of The Love Boat:

Okay, everybody in your life is here--solve something! 

Sure, occasionally people get off the boat and don't get back on or get on the wrong one (such as a new bride in a very funny Love Boat episode in which the honeymoon couple keeps encountering problems that keep them apart). And occasionally, people get picked up by helicopter from a ship. But generally speaking, the forced communal living lends itself to certain plots--

Particularly murder mysteries!

In Murder, She Wrote, Jessica investigates the death of a wife who was the mother of her niece's dead husband. (It's not as complicated as it sounds.)

In Diagnosis Murder, the entire Scooby-gang goes on a cruise where they encounter a black widow intent on murdering her latest husband. 

In Scarecrow & Mrs. King, Lee and Amanda go on a wedding cruise with a bunch of other spies in order to catch one of them.

In Columbo, a passenger kills a lounge singer who is blackmailing him. 

Hey, even X-Files has a cruise ship episode! 

In a way, the cruise ship mystery is a variation on the cozy mystery or manor house mystery--and makes a good deal more sense than romance in the same environment.