British crime dramas deserve some credit as a group–and PBS Masterpiece for re-airing them. Viewers never quite know what hoops the police will jump through next, the twists and turns a series will take, and what unlikely villain will end up at the end of each whodunnit. That’s the test of all mystery series, whether you’re watching a strange villain and almost as strange cop in Luther or the tempered, well-intentioned Detective Chief Inspector Cassie Stuart and her skeptical partner Detective Sergeant Sunny Khan tracking down 40-year-old crimes in Unforgotten. With its fifth season currently in production, PBS is now streaming the first three seasons as part of its Passport membership, a chance for U.S. viewers to get caught up on the show.
The star of the original Life on Mars is back as a detective solving crimes in the new BritBox original series from IPT,Grace. John Simm, also known for his run on Doctor Who, State of Play and other British dramas plays Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a cop sent down to desk duty a few years ago for embarrassing the bureau by bringing in a psychic to help solve a crime. When a former colleague rises up the ranks and pulls D.S. Grace in to a high-profile case, viewers get to meet the next great TV detective. The first episode of Grace is now streaming in the U.S. exclusively here on BritBox via Amazon.
British television series that make their way to America tend to be refreshing in that each new show is incredibly different from the last. No matter how many times Americans catch the latest Brit/Irish/Scot police procedural, it’s nearly impossible to follow how each level of government polices, and manages the policing, of its citizenry. That quirk doesn’t get more pronounced than in the opener to The Salisbury Poisonings, a four-part series airing Monday evenings on AMC. The series will likely mean less to those on this side of the pond, although the real-life attempt on the lives of a Russian spy and his daughter living in Salisbury was international news in March 2018, victims of Vladimir Putin’s spy network. But the first episode has the kind of TV writing that should bring the show to the attention of anglophiles.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, and the new Hugh Laurie four-part star vehicle Roadkill may not be the Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Derry Girls, The Woman in White, Mr. Selfridge, Zen, Quirke, or Sherlock, but it’s better than most of the UK series that have made it to the small screen in the past few years. Airing in the UK on BBC One this past Fall and first in the U.S. as part of PBS’s Masterpiece series, it is now available on Amazon and DVD (still the PBS choice platform for British productions). A lucky show that finished production before the pandemic kicked into full force, Roadkill will be a must-see for Laurie fans, and its angle on politics and telling a politician’s personal story should be enough to keep other anglophiles interested.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery series like Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. The 2019 British series A Confession is streaming on BritBox in the U.S. via Amazon, and it may not be as good as any of these, but it does eclipse recent series like Dublin Murders, The Silence,The Five,The Missing,Thirteen,Broadchurch, and Collateral. It is based on the real-life story of the murders of two women in 2003 and 2011, so the drama is dark and real. And it offers up a cast of familiar genre actors that will make you want to take a look.
We’re always on the lookout for the next great British/Irish/Scottish/UK police procedural or mystery, after the next Life on Mars orAshes to Ashes, Hinterland or Shetland, Marchlands or Lightfields, Zen or Quirke, or, of course, Sherlock. So the pay-channel Starz releasing a late-year mystery series called Dublin Murders was going to get our attention. Filmed in Belfast and Dublin, with a noir sensibility–dark places, mysterious characters, and murder–the series has the potential to be a good detective series. Billed as an “eight-part mystery series with a taproot that drops deep down into Ireland’s past, foreshadows the present and brings insight to its future,” the story follows Sarah Greene as Cassie Maddox and Killian Scott as Rob Reilly, homicide detectives on the trail of the murderer of a school girl. The murder was similar–too similar–to a murder in the city’s past.
Maddox and Reilly appear appealing enough at first. They share a secret of the past that would get them fired had anyone found out: Reilly isn’t really Reilly, but the alter ego of the sole survivor of the crime years ago that resulted in two missing friends, never to be found. Unfortunately he’s a witness who can’t remember, and by all accounts he shouldn’t be involved with this investigation because of his clear conflict of interest. Merged with his pursuit of the person behind the missing kids and the recent murder is a story of Maddox’s history catching up with her. As a child her parents were killed in an auto accident, and to deal with it mentally she invented an imaginary friend she named Lexie. As an undercover cop, she took on the name Lexie as her alter ego. Now she and one of her former colleagues stumble upon another murder, a woman who looks just like Cassie. And surprise: her name is Lexie. Always waiting for the possibility that we’ve stumbled into an unreliable narrator series, ultimately that’s not the case, the woman was real and not something we’re seeing through Maddox’s imagination. But the series stumbles for other reasons.
Based on the first two novels of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels, In the Woods and The Likeness, a key problem is combining the stories from two books to make into one season of television–stories that have little to do with each other. Both cops have these common stories involving dual personas so it’s easy to see how someone thought it might work. But it doesn’t. The first three episodes develop the characters, but suddenly they lose their personalities. The quiet, likeable, and sympathetic Reilly becomes a jerk, a supremely angry and mean protagonist pushing away Maddox and everyone else and leaving the audience with little to care about from his plot thread. Maddox has the same collision of character–once admirable and mostly by-the-book, she turns into a nasty character, bitter and horrible to those who care about her. As Reilly becomes trapped in a development of his own making, Maddox agrees to a job with her former colleague, a preposterous undercover operation impersonating the deceased Lexie in order to discover her murderer.
Our borgBest of 2018 list continues today with the best in television. If you missed it, check out our review of the Best Movies of 2018 here and the Kick-Ass Heroines of 2018 here.
Without further ado, this year’s Best in Television:
Best Borg TV Series, Best TV Borg – Humans (AMC). No other series touches on the ramifications of technology, specifically the perils of an onslaught of real-world cyborg technology, like AMC’s Humans. This year three characters stood out, including Gemma Chan’s Mia, the cyborg Synth from past seasons, who sacrificed everything for the liberty of cyborgs in the UK. Then there was Ruth Bradley’s Karen Voss, a Synth who refused to live segregated from the humans, opting instead for a normal life for the cyborg son she assumed care for. And Katherine Parkinson’s Laura Hawkins, a human lawyer who fought so hard for the cause of the Synths all year, only to throw away all the good she had done, failing the first real challenge that was presented to her. This year’s best TV borg is shared by Synths Mia and Karen, as each showed the uphill battle any future outsider must overcome when faced with humans.
Best Sci-fi TV Series – The Man in the High Castle (Amazon). What had been a two-season build-up all came together in the series’ third season with the audacity of killing off key characters, wisely adhering to the framework of the source Philip K. Dick novel. The use of science fiction to tell an often gut-wrenching array of subplots and unique characters has set up a fourth season with plenty to address. Exciting, smart, scary, and even fun, it is an unusual science fiction show that isn’t merely trigger-happy sci-fi. Honorable mention: Humans (AMC), Counterpart (Starz).
Best New TV Series, Best Reboot, Best Ensemble Cast – Magnum PI (CBS). If you would have told us a year ago our favorite show this year would be a reboot of Magnum, p.i. starring Suicide Squad’s Jay Hernandez and an actress in the iconic role of John Hillerman’s Higgins, we wouldn’t have believed it. And yet, even as diehard fans of the original, we had to acknowledge that many elements of the reboot series were even better in the new series. With the dangerous risk of taking on a beloved property, the production maintained loyalty to the original while making it fresh, scoring Magnum PI high marks on all counts. Every character was smartly written–suave and confident Magnum, energetic Rick and TC, and a savvy Higgins–every actor was perfectly cast, and each show was another round of nostalgic fun for fans of the original. Best New TV Series Honorable mention for Best New TV Series: Counterpart (Starz), Lodge 49 (AMC).
Best Series, Best Drama, Best Comedy – Lodge 49 (AMC). Lodge 49 told two stories: a darkly serious drama of real people dealing with real-life 2018 adversity, and the other a comedy farce like no other. Hanging over our heads was the idea that this was going to be a fantasy show, complete with secret codes, hidden rooms, and psychic visions. If you’re looking for all the elements of great fantasy the hint of it all could be found throughout this series. And yet it wasn’t fantasy at all. An oddball Cheers? A southern Twin Peaks without the Lynchian weirdness? Star Wyatt Russell’s hero Dud could be dismissed as a typical young man with no vision, or maybe he’s that idealist that everyone needs to strive to be. Maybe we’ll learn more about that next season. Honorable mention for Best Drama: Counterpart (Starz). Honorable mention for Best Comedy: Baskets (FX). Continue reading →
