Midsomer Murders has a new season, and Britain is not the first country to see it. ABC in Australia has premiered the twenty-sixth season of the long-running ITV whodunit, a cozy mystery franchise built on picture-postcard villages and a body count, and has put all four new feature-length films on its ABC iview streaming service. In the UK, ITV has not yet aired the new cases, or the season before them.

Neil Dudgeon returns as DCI John Barnaby, with Nick Hendrix as his sergeant, DS Jamie Winter, Annette Badland as pathologist Dr Fleur Perkins and Fiona Dolman as Sarah Barnaby. Bentley Productions makes the series for ITV from Caroline Graham’s Chief Inspector Barnaby novels, which Anthony Horowitz first adapted for television.

Four new cases, from a wellness retreat to a ring light

The season opened on ABC TV on 7 November 2026, according to the show’s episode records, and continues on Saturdays at 8.30pm, while ABC iview carries every episode at once. Each film runs close to an hour and a half, 88 to 89 minutes in ABC’s listings, in keeping with the feature-length format the show has used since 1997.

The opener, “Mindful to Murder”, follows a leading wellness practitioner who inherits a vast manor and turns it into an exclusive retreat, a plan that, in ABC’s synopsis, sparks outrage in the village before the retreat turns deadly. “The Sons of Annerby” starts with the murder of the president of a motorcycle club, and Barnaby has to work out whether the killing came from resistance to change inside the group or from something more personal.

The third film, “A Menu for Murder”, bends the formula. A woman is killed during a luxury dining experience aboard a restored railway carriage, Barnaby sees it happen, and as a witness he has to hand the investigation to Winter. The closer, “Like and Subscribe”, opens with a nanny for a VIP family killed by an exploding ring light, which sends the detectives into social media influencing and the world of domestic staff for the super-rich.

Paul Gibson directed the opening film from a script by Julia Gilbert, one of the show’s regular writers. Episode records date its shoot to March and April 2026, which means ABC is airing the season within months of filming.

Why Australia sees the new films before Britain

ITV ordered the season in October 2025, asking for four films to be delivered in 2026. “We’re thrilled to be returning to Midsomer with Barnaby and Winter,” ITV drama commissioner Huw Kennair Jones said at the time. “Series 26 promises to deliver four brilliant brand new cases for the legion of Midsomer Murders fans to enjoy.” Executive producer Michele Buck called it a chance “to bring viewers more tales from the fascinating world of Midsomer Murders.”

What ITV has not done is keep pace with its own production line. ITV1 aired the first two films of series 24 on 29 and 30 December 2025. The other two films of series 24, and all four films of series 25, which Acorn TV released in North America from 8 December 2025, still have no UK broadcast date in the show’s episode records. With the new season out in Australia, 148 Midsomer films now exist, and 138 of them have aired on ITV.

The distributor’s pitch explains part of the gap. Louise Pedersen, chief executive of All3Media International, said when the season was ordered that the show’s “repeatable loyalty factor enables us to position the series on various platforms, from PSBs to AVOD and FAST,” and called Midsomer Murders “a brand that continues to resonate with fans both globally and here in the UK.” All3Media says the series is a top-three show in Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltics, is active in nearly 200 territories, and runs as the most-watched FAST channel on ITVX, the dedicated stream of back episodes inside ITV’s app.

Almost thirty years of murders, and two Barnabys

The franchise began with the pilot “The Killings of Badger’s Drift” on 23 March 1997, with John Nettles as DCI Tom Barnaby. Nettles played the role in 81 episodes before leaving in 2011, and Dudgeon took over as his younger cousin, John Barnaby, who has led Causton CID ever since. Hendrix joined in 2016 and Badland in 2018, so the core team has stayed in place for most of a decade.

That stability is the point of the show. Every film follows the same pattern of a village feud, a run of improbable killings and a calm unmasking, which has made Midsomer Murders the sort of series that broadcasters around the world can schedule for years. The new season keeps the pattern and changes the targets: wellness culture, biker clubs, luxury dining and influencer households.

Where to watch season 26

In Australia, the four new films are on ABC TV on Saturdays at 8.30pm and all of them are on ABC iview. Acorn TV, the show’s US streaming home, has not announced a date for the season. ITV has not scheduled it either, and back episodes remain on ITVX in the UK.

For a show whose running joke is that nobody in Midsomer County is safe, the newest twist sits outside the plots: British viewers, the audience the county was invented for, will be the last to find out who did it.