Good Thursday everyone. This week is going to be a little different because as I write this, my mother-in-law, Christina Francis Pappas, nee Conley, passed away two days ago. So no new acquisitions this week as we deal with things here in Virginia, but I would like to talk about three British series that we always watched when we were visiting her.
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Why yes, that is Clarke Peters from The Wire there. He spends a lot of time in Britain and so became part of the wonderful cast of guest stars in Midsomer Murders, which is set in a fictional county of Britain loosely based on Oxfordshire. This show is sometimes a straight-up weird mix of comedy and drama and gentle cop work; one episode might be a straight-up comedy with no murder at all (there is at least one where the murders all turn out to be accidents but there are definitely crimes involved) to icky situations involving incest and obsession. It's very much ITV/Channel 3, the commercial side of British television. But it's been quite well run over the nearly 25 years it's been on the air (currently, they are in season 22, the second half of which is due next year), with only two main detectives over those years (originally John Nettles as DCI Tom Barnaby, succeeded Neil Dudgeon as his cousin DCI John Barnaby) and a succession of assistant detecctives, medical examiners and families. It can be quite light-handed while balancing that with the darkness of murder cases and is something that I will absolutely always out on for comfort viewing.
Plus, come on, how can you resist a TV series whose main theme is performed on a theremin?
Half the fun of the series is seeing guest stars before they got big and the very first episode, "The Killings At Badgers Drift," shows that off. Hey, Emily Mortimer before the rest of her fantastic career! And then Orlando Bloom later as the town lothario! Henry Cavill! Tobias Menzie! Seriously, the entire first episode is on YouTube and you should check it out; this is a good representation and will ket you know if this is your bag.
All of Midsomer Murders is streaming on Acorn TV and then various amounts are streaming on things like Fubo, Amazon Prime's Acorn Channel (I think they don't have the current season, which Acorn gets as it's airing), Tubi with ads and so on. All 21 seasons are also probably all on DVD at your local library
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Next up, and darker, is the great Brenda Blethyn in the (also ITV) series Vera. Now in it's 11th season, this crime drama set in Northumberland (so, the northern Britain area around Newcastle), this is a damn good series about Vera Stanhope, a police chief inspector who obviously has a damaged past but tries not to let it get in the way of solving cases.
Blethyn has a gift for being able to play someone with a great deal of family drama behind her who maybye has one too many drinks alone in her family home now that her father has passed away, but she still has a certain lightness to her. (That is, until someone on her team screws up and she has to let them have it.). I don't quite love this as much as I love Midsomer, but it's a well-done show that has managed to go through 11 seasons now with no big dip in quality. (Like Midsomer, each season is usually 4-6 90 minute episodes, so basically they've made a bunch of movies.)
An interesting contrast between this and Midsomer is just how bleak the landscape can feel. Whereas the Oxfordshire-esque landscape of Midsomer can feel lush and almost erotic in how green it is (to the point where they have at least three episodes that invoke the myth of the Green Man), Vera is set in a harsh and forbidden landscape on the border of Scotland that always feels in this version like it's in the middle of fall or the end of winter. It's forbidding and unkind and unforgiving and even when the sun appears it's a wan thing that doesn't smile on the proceedings.
By the way, if you watch this, keep an eye out for Kenny. He's the older guy in the department that at first feels like he's just slacking toward retirement but he flourishes under being challenged by Vera and he's one of my favorite parts of the show.
Vera is in one of those weird situations where out of the 11 seasons, 7 are on Britbox and 4 are on Acorn (and their corresponding Amazon channels). The first six are all on Hoopla. It's also widely available on DVD in the USA so check your local library.
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Now...onto the bleakness. Y Gwyll/Hinterland was a Welsh-language SC4 series, later shown in English with occasional Welsh, about a DCI Tom Mathias who gets reassigned to Wales after an indeterminate event has him on the outs with his family and his superiors. Now this, this show could be bleak as hell. So few smiles or levity, this is police darkness at a higher level. And a landscape that is simply blasted to hell, eternally on the verge of winter with nary a scrap of green. And yet, it never feels hopeless...just bleak. A bleakness with a certain level of beauty to it.
Which describes a lot of Y Gwyll. It's a series about the bleakness of the human soul at times, but also with a hope of redemption for whatever Mathias went through and for the people left behind in the rubble. It's a dark series at time, but I can always recommend all three series that we have of it.
All three seasons of Y Gwyll/Hinterland are available for streaming on Acorn TV. (And by the way, this whole post can be an advertisement for Acorn, which is a fantastic resource for Commonwealth TV series. I can also recommend things like Pie In The Sky, a delightful detective series with Richard Griffiths as a retiring detective who just wants to open a bakery. Or Brokenwood, a Kiwi dramedy about a country-music obsessed detective who ends up in a small town police station. Or god, if you don't know Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries yet, I don't know what to tell you.)
That's all for this week. See you next week, where hopefully I'll be home and back to my usual silliness. Stay good, you all.
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