“Facials. Carpools. Soccer. Murder.”

Thirty-one-year-old Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper in the classic TV series The Wonder Years, and has since become something of a math genius, enjoyed recurring turns on The West Wing, and done a lingerie pictorial in Stuff magazine (that’s right: she’s no kid any longer), is returning to television as--wait for it--“a stay-at-home mother who bakes cookies, runs a carpool, and chases down criminals.” TV Squad reporter Anna Johns remarks, “She’s either a 30-something Veronica Mars, or a 30-something Jessica Fletcher.” But McKellar’s role as journalist Maddie Monroe probably also owes something to Amanda King (played by Kate Jackson), the divorced suburban mother of two who was involuntarily drawn into the espionage game in Scarecrow and Mrs. King. Both parts prove the maxim that the first thing young moms learn is to multitask.

McKellar’s Inspector Mom is a project of LMN Television, a sister network to Lifetime. A movie-length introduction to this series will air on Monday, November 18, at 8 p.m. Following that, though, “the mystery moves to the Internet [site] LMN.tv, where eight short video segments will be released through April.” Whether viewers can be convinced to keep up with Maddie’s earnest adventures on their laptops, rather than their TV sets, is anybody’s guess. But Inspector Mom is an interesting experiment, moving us one significant step closer to that day when personal computers are not only essential tools of work, but accepted sources of entertainment.