Review by C.J. Bunce
What is your favorite Ioan Gruffudd series? Maybe it’s the lead role in all the A&E Horatio Hornblower adaptations. Or Sarah Michelle Gellar’s co-star in Ringer. Or the medical examiner Dr. Henry Morgan, who appears younger than his son played by Judd Hirsch, and has great chemistry with Alana De La Garza in Forever. Or maybe it’s his movie roles, like as Reed Richards in the Fantastic Four movies. Another character to consider is his Dr. Daniel Harrow, a Queensland-based forensic pathologist on the Australian series Harrow, a sleuth who gets too caught up in his cases, and finds himself in deep water at work and at home more often than not. Yet another entry in the “detective on a boat” trope, it will be a must for fans of the actor despite slipping its direction in the third season. Although not renewed for a fourth season, all the plot threads are wrapped nicely, so you’re not left hanging with a partial series. All three seasons of Harrow are streaming now on Hulu and the CW app.
As you’ll see in the clever animated introduction (with a catchy theme song), Harrow lives on a boat. He also killed a man. Or did he? The first season follows the subplot of who killed Harrow’s ex-wife’s lover and why. Originally running from 2018-2021, the show sees Harrow as the latest detective genius, a Sherlock Holmes meets House, MD, type–although the writing for Gruffudd as a similar sleuth was better in Forever. But here viewers get even more of his mix of certainty and quirky curiosity with a new case every episode for 30 episodes. Is this the closest we’ll get to Gruffudd as Holmes? Possibly, yet Gruffudd also doesn’t seem to age, so we may have a few decades ahead to find out.
Initially Harrow solves crimes with the help of Brisbane police officer Sgt. Soroya Dass (Mirrah Foulkes), along with junior pathologist Simon Van Reyk (Remy Hii) and senior pathologist Lyle Ridgewell Livingston Fairley (Darren Gilshenan), who work with him at the fictitious Queensland Institute of Forensic Medicine (QIFM).
It’s the rare series that focuses on the back side of police investigations (like Tru Calling and the pinnacle of the genre, Quincy, ME), an area usually found in cold case shows. Damien Garvey plays Bryan Nichols, Detective Senior Sergeant at Queensland Police’s Criminal Investigation Branch, who has a romantic relationship with Harrow’s boss, played by Robyn Malcolm. With Harrow always driving the investigations, viewers will be entertained as he works all the angles with each supporting character. He spars then later befriends Fairley and Nichols. He is mentor to Simon.
The series begins and ends with his relationship with troubled daughter Fern, played by Ella Newton, who is strong in the first season but left making worse decisions as the show progresses. Callan, her boyfriend in the second season played by Hunter Page-Lochard, emerges as one of the series’ better written characters. Harrow has his own romantic encounters. First with Sgt. Dass in the first season, before he stumbles into a relationship with co-worker Dr. Fairley’s niece, Dr. Grace Molyneux, played by Jolene Anderson.
Disappointments with writing choices abound. Sgt. Dass is engaging, yet vanishes after the first season. Another strong character is promptly killed off early on. Then Harrow’s unknown son shows up in Season 3 and torpedoes a third of the show’s available content instead of what makes the series great: more Gruffudd as the quirky, earnest sleuth. Somehow Harrow’s relationships with Dr. Molyneux, DSS Nichols, and Dr. Fairley pull up the third season into something still worth riding out to the end. Fun episodes have Harrow and Nichols join Fairley on a case in his tiny hometown, and other has the detectives going cosplay mode when a dual among historical society performers results in murder.
We at borg include Australian mystery shows in our long crunch of British TV analysis (find links to those at the end of the review here), and Harrow falls squarely in the middle of the pack. Among Aussie fare, it’s another strong entry along with Mystery Road, Troppo, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Glitch, better than The Gloaming and much better than the short-lived Reef Break, but not at the top of the pack with this year’s masterpiece Deadloch.
Fans of Gruffudd will love seeing more of the actor in this type of role, and fans of quirky detectives will probably go for it, too. Catch all three seasons of Harrow now on Hulu and the CW app.
