Even More TV Crime

I wish I could tell you that at the end of the day, I sit with a glass of sherry and read some improving literature. The fact is, though, that it's more likely to be a glass of beer (but a microbrew, so maybe that counts for something) and a crime drama on TV. Sure, I read plenty of books, but aside from history, I've pretty much abandoned improving books in favor of genre fiction, especially mysteries. Now that it's tax season, though, even that seems like too much work. I'd rather just let TV drama wash over me.

You already know what a complete fangirl I am for the late Veronica Mars. When I heard that its creative team, Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero, were venturing back into TV, I got excited. Then I heard it was to be a zombie show called iZombie. Yuck. I can't stand all that vampire/zombie/paranormal stuff. But I had to check it out, in spite of my aversion to that particular genre––and a fervent desire not to see anybody eating brains while I'm trying to digest my dinner.

It turns out that iZombie's protagonist, Liv Moore (played by Rose McIver), is basically a more grownup––and undead––Veronica Mars. Same snarky voiceover, same petite blonde pitbull attitude, same dark cloud following her around. The whole zombie thing keeps me from being totally in love with it, but I like it and it's on my DVR series queue.

The show begins with Liv as a smart and talented medical intern in Seattle who decides to take a night off to go to a party on a boat, at the urging of one of her intern colleagues. Liv isn't enjoying the party much and is about to leave when all hell breaks loose with people screaming, running, the boat on fire, you name it. Some guy attacks Liv and the next thing you know, she's waking up in a body bag on the beach and freaking out the one witness who sees her emerge from the body bag and stumble away.

It takes Liv a little while to realize that she's a zombie––though the pallor, circles around the eyes, strawlike hair and sudden craving for brains (with sriracha sauce, please; this is the 20-teens, after all) give it away. She switches to working in the Seattle PD morgue so that she doesn't have to kill anybody to access their gray matter. Her boss there, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti, is the one person who figures out her secret and decides to figure out if he can cure zombie-ism. (That would look pretty good on a CV, right?)

Liv finds that when she eats a corpse's brains, the person's thoughts, feelings and attitudes flood into her consciousness, including, in some cases brief flashes of their murders. She wants to help the police solve the murder cases, but she can hardly tell them how she comes across her knowledge, so she claims to be a psychic. She ends up working with another snark-meister, Detective Clive Babinaux. Their relationship is the most frequent source of the show's smartarse repartée.

Rounding out the main cast is Liv's society matron mother, her best friend and roommate, and her former fiancé, Major Lilywhite (seriously, that's the character's name), whom she felt she had to break up with out of a fear that some evening she might be overcome by a desire to crack his head open and feast. No drama is complete without a nemesis, and Liv's is another zombie, Blaine DeBeers. Blaine has none of Liv's scruples about getting ahold of brains only from the already dead, and he's quickly turning into the creator of a Seattle zombie subculture. His clashes with Liv are another source of some very entertaining dialog.

If you enjoyed Veronica Mars or you're into the whole vampire/zombie thing, check out iZombie. It's on the CW network on Tuesdays at 9pm Eastern. Catch up on past episodes on the CW site, here.

I need to digress for just a minute. Did you know there is actually a book of scholarly essays about the Veronica Mars TV show? Well, there is. It's titled Investigating Veronica Mars: Essays on the Teen Detective Series (McFarland, 2011). Here's its description:

During the course of its three seasons, Veronica Mars captured the attention of fans and academics alike. The 12 scholarly essays in this collection examine the show's most compelling elements. Topics covered include vintage television, the search for the mother, fatherhood, the show's connection to classical Greek paradigms, the anti-hero's journey, rape narrative and meaning, and television fandom. Collectively, these essays reveal how a teen television show––equal parts noir, romance, social realism and father-daughter drama––became a worthy subject for scholarly study.

I don't feel compelled to read it, but this makes me feel a little less weird about being an AARP-eligible VM fan.

Did you watch the drama Fortitude that I previewed here? Thursday night was the season finale and all I can say is that this was one very weird Nordic police procedural, what with people being turned into murder machines by prehistoric insects crawling back to life out of mammoth corpses that had become exposed because of climate change. The plot is, needless to say, a little on the crazy side, and its strands are complicated (check out this infographic), but it is still compelling to watch, because of the intensity of the acting and its outstanding cast.

The big names, Michael Gambon and Stanley Tucci, are as good as you'd expect, but the lesser-known actors really grab attention, especially Richard Dormer as Sheriff Dan Anderssen. The sheriff is superficially a bit of a brute, but with a whole lot more going on under that surface. If you want to get more information about Fortitude and see some videos, head over here. I was surprised to hear that despite the show's body count, there will be a second season. I'll be watching.

I will confess to you that from 2003-2008, one of my real guilty pleasures in TV watching was Las Vegas, a show set in the fictional Montecito resort and casino, which focused on the Montecito's security and other operational personnel. The cast included James Caan, as head of operations, and his principal security officer, Danny McCoy, played by Josh Duhamel.

Josh Duhamel is back in a new police procedural called Battle Creek. Surprise, it's set in Battle Creek, Michigan. Local police detective Russ Agnew (played by Dean Winters) is a hangdog, rumpled mess and could win awards for cynicism. Agnew is perennially disgruntled by the department's lack of funding and, as he sees it, respect. As the show begins, he feels even more put upon than usual when the FBI sets up across the hall and the impossibly handsome and charismatic Agent Milt Chamberlain (honestly, what is with these character names?), played by Duhamel, is assigned to be the new liaison between the FBI and local law enforcement. In other words, Milt is now Russ's extremely unwanted partner.

The dynamic between the partners is entertaining, and we're still not sure we've been given the real reason why Milt is in Battle Creek, rather than off in some less backwater-ish city and quickly climbing up the ranks. The other cast members are fun to watch too. The great English actress, Janet McTeer, plays Commander Guziewicz, and you'll recognize Kal Penn from the West Wing as Detective White.

The crime-of-the-week plots are decent. They had this Mainer at the second episode, which featured a death-by-maple-syrup murder. The most recent episode did fall into the old the-recognizable-guest-star-dunnit trap (see How to Watch TV Crime Dramas if you want to know my formulas). As soon as my husband and I saw Peter Jacobson, who used to play Dr. Taub on House, we knew he'd be the perp; it was just a question of how and why. Still, it was an entertaining way to spend an hour. If you'd like to give it a try, it's on CBS on Sunday nights at 10pm Eastern. Here's the most important thing: this coming Sunday, the guest star is Candice Bergen––and she's playing a con artist!

By the way, speaking of exceptions to the recognizable-guest-star-dunnit rule, when we watched Bones on Thursday night (yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a lot of TV watching), we spotted Jason Gray-Stanford, who used to play Lt. Randy Disher on Monk. Well, obviously, he was going to be the killer, right? But Bones pulled a fast one and didn't follow convention this time. I have to tell you, though, their killer wasn't believable. They should have followed the formula!  (UPDATE––WITH A SPOILER: A month later, Bones revisited the serial killer case in that episode, and Randy Disher turned out to be the killer after all. The formula wins again!)

Murder in Paradise, Murder at the Top of the World

In the last two weeks, we've had four snowstorms and a total of almost four feet of snow. Excuse me if I find it hard to get too excited about a new murder mystery series set above the Arctic Circle. Still, given the star-studded cast and the big publicity, I had to at least check out Fortitude, a 12-part miniseries that began last week.

The production is a venture between the UK's Sky television and the US's Pivot channel. (What, you never heard of the Pivot channel?) Here's the setup. Fortitude is a settlement of about 700 residents, nearly all of whom work at the Arctic Research Centre or in mining. Michael Gambon plays one of the few exceptions; he's a wildlife photographer who, in one of the drama's first scenes, is walking along an icy shore when, in the distance, he sees a man down and being mauled by a polar bear. He gets a rifle shot off at the bear, but then a lawman shouts at him that it's all under control and he should leave.

That lawman is Sheriff Dan Anderssen, and he quickly finds that the man is a homicide victim, the first ever in Fortitude. Anderssen is none too pleased to find that means the arrival of an outside investigator from London and formerly of the FBI, Eugene Morton, played by Stanley Tucci. Morton's investigation reveals that there is a whole lot more simmering on the woodstove in Fortitude than hot soup.

The local governor, Hildur Odegard (played by Sophie Gråbɵl, who was in the original Danish production of The Killing), has big ambitions for Fortitude. She wants to build one of those ice hotels to draw a lot of tourists. A homicide isn't going to help her plans. Neither will a local boy's sudden illness that might be measles but might be a strain of polio that he brought with him when his family moved to Fortitude from Afghanistan. To add to her headaches, somebody has discovered what look like wooly mammoth bones, which biologist Stoddart (played by a former Doctor Who, Christopher Eccleston) would use to put the kibosh on the hotel.

I've only watched the first episode of Fortitude, but I thought I should let you all know about it so you can check it out for yourself. Nordic noir, which mystery mavens have been familiar with for several years now, has started to gain strength in the TV medium. If you enjoyed The Killing or other moody crime dramas, give this one a try. It's got that gloomy, claustrophobic foreboding that is so familiar in Nordic noir. But fair warning; you have to pay very close attention. It's not clear at the outset what is going on a lot of the time and the mix of the characters' accents often makes it hard to follow the dialog.

Checking out the series at all can be a bit of a challenge. In the UK, it's on Sky Atlantic on Thursday nights at 9pm. If you're in the US, do you have the Pivot channel? If you have DirecTV, it's included in most packages on channel 267, and the show is on Thursdays at 10pm (Eastern). Some satellite and cable systems that don't carry the Pivot channel nevertheless carry Fortitude as an on-demand program, so take a look at that possibility. The Pivot channel website is streaming the series here as well. Finally, if you want to educate yourself about the series, visit its website here.

If I can't be on a nice warm beach this winter (like my brother-in-law and his spouse, who are in Maui right now, not that I resent them at all), then watching Death in Paradise allows me to enjoy the sun, sand, sparkling sea, tropical breezes––and murder––vicariously. This UK production, filmed on Guadeloupe, is set on the fictional island of Sainte Marie.

The series began in 2011 on the BBC, and is now in Season Four. In the US, you can likely find it on your local PBS station, most of which are currently showing Season Two. If you go to the pbs.org website, you can watch streaming video back to the beginning of the series.

The series begin with the arrival of Detective Inspector Richard Poole of Scotland Yard to Sainte Marie. Poole is disgruntled to find himself sent to Sainte Marie to solve the murder of a police officer, and then horrified when he is pressured to assume the dead man's position on the force. Poole is hostile to sun and heat and he can't stand the relaxed pace. (Kind of like my cousin Lisa from Boston, who gets very irritated when the staff at my local Dunkin' Donuts tries to make small talk rather than produce her coffee instantly and with zero chit-chat.) Poole stomps around Sainte Marie wearing a suit and tie, seeming to hope that if he continues to dress as a Londoner he'll return to London very soon. No such luck.

As Poole reluctantly settles in, he gets to know the local force. Commissioner Patterson is intensely grouchy, but officers Fidel and Dwayne are unfamiliar with the concept of intensity. That's not the case with the gorgeous––but sharp tongued––Camille Bordey. Camille is the only female on the police force, but anybody who tries to take advantage of her beauty or gender is likely to get sliced up by that tongue. She's none too patient with this stuffy English interloper, but they develop a prickly, yet effective, partnership.

The cases that Poole, Camille and the force tackle are sometimes very island-oriented, such as voodoo, a scuba diving death, and drug running by yacht. Others, though, could be crimes committed anywhere; the viewers just get the added treat of the tropical scenery.

I won't claim that Death in Paradise is high art or that the production values are elevated. No, this is standard BBC murder mystery fare––but worth watching because of the appeal of the characters and the attractiveness of the setting.

Just a quick final mention. If you prefer your crime stories to be set somewhere between the extremes of the Arctic Circle and Sainte Marie, the third season of The Americans just began on FX. This thrilling and stylish story of deep undercover KGB spies working in Washington DC in the 1980s, which I wrote about here two years ago, is entering a fascinating new phase as the protagonists' two kids become interesting to the Soviets as possible second-generation agents. The success of The Americans has apparently inspired a new show on NBC called Allegiance, which began last night. I'll be sticking with FX.

More TV!

The Game

This six-part espionage miniseries began on Wednesday on BBC America. It's a moody, stylish production set in 1972 England, then in the midst of a lengthy miners' strike that caused power outages even at MI-5 headquarters. A KGB officer named Arkady Malinov gets himself arrested for public drunkenness and assault on a police officer so he can tell MI-5 that he wants to defect and act as a double agent. Malinov claims he wants to act as a double agent so he can reveal to the British what he learns about the Soviet-planned Operation Glass.

What's Operation Glass? Well, Malinov doesn't really know, but he knows it's huge and will change forever the status of the Cold War. It involves agents the USSR has in the UK, and Malinov says he'll let MI-5 know who they are whenever he finds out. Although they feel sure Malinov isn't telling all he knows, MI-5's counterespionage team, which calls itself the Fray, gets to work.

The team is headed by the MI-5 chief, code-named Daddy, and played by that craggy-faced lion, Brian Cox. Daddy's second is Bobby Waterhouse, a snakelike conniver who lives with his mother, a woman who could give Angela Lansbury's character in The Manchurian Candidate a run for her money. Waterhouse's deputy is Sarah Montag, a sharp and ambitious analyst. Her husband, Alan, is socially awkward, but a whiz at the electronic eavesdropping side of the business. Secretary Wendy Straw is a young thing who doesn't have much to say so far. Seconded to the team from Special Branch is Detective Constable Jim Fenchurch, who thinks these MI-5 guys are much too full of themselves.

Our protagonist is the seventh member of the Fray, the young and beautiful Joe Lambe. You might remember him from PBS shows like the Silk miniseries and the recent remake of The Lady Vanishes. Joe is tormented by a failed mission in Poland, one that only Daddy knows the facts about. One of the things that Daddy knows is that a Soviet agent involved in that mission is in the UK, he's part of Operation Glass, and Joe's personal desire to kill this agent will be both a spur and a hazard.

From what I've read, it appears that each week of the series will focus on a new target revealed to the Fray by Malinov, whom the team will then try to use to find out more about Operation Glass. After just one episode, it's hard to tell how this series will shape up, but I'll definitely keep watching. It's got that moody look and music appropriate to Cold War espionage drama, and the actors are fun to watch. (Though I do wish they'd enunciate! It's a sad state of affairs when even British-trained actors mumble so much these days.) Each member of the Fray has his or her own secrets, there are tensions and conflicts between them, and their office-politics intrigues may turn out to be as much a focus of the series as Operation Glass.

The Game is on BBC America on Wednesday nights at 10:00pm Eastern time.

Death Comes to Pemberley

Did you watch the two-part Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Mystery? I did, and even though it doesn't seem quite right to say this about a Jane Austen-ish adaptation, I thought it was a hoot.

Of course, this is based on P. D. James's novel of the same name. James imagined Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet six years after their marriage at the end of Pride and Prejudice. They are now living happily at Pemberley with their young son, and busily planning their annual dinner and dance for hundreds.

The festivities have to be cancelled when Lydia, Elizabeth's flibbertigibbet of a younger sister comes careening up the drive in a coach and then bursts out of its door, screaming that her husband, the ne'er-do-well Wickham, has been killed. Well, more's the pity, it quickly turns out that it's Captain Denny who's been killed. But Wickham is arrested for the crime, and that's even better than his being the murder victim if you're a Wickham hater––as all right-thinking people are, of course.

James's book was controversial. The most ardent fans of Jane Austen and P. D. James seemed to dislike it. A lot of Austen devotées dislike the whole genre of novels featuring later or re-imagined lives of Austen characters, and they disliked this book on principle; some especially because it was a crime novel. Many P. D. James fans thought the plot wasn't up to James's usual standards. But I liked the book. It wasn't a case of Mr. Darcy suddenly becoming a detective. Instead, there is a judicial investigation, and Darcy is stuck with having to try to clear a man he heartily detests, since having his brother-in-law hanged as a murderer will be a stain on the Darcy name. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learns a few things here and there that seem to provide some clues as to what really happened to Captain Denny.

The dramatization accentuates the soap-opera potential of the P. D. James plot. A love triangle involving Darcy's sister Georgiana is raised in importance, while the strain that this affair––and, of course, the murder––puts on Elizabeth and Darcy threatens their love. There are emotional scenes––well, as emotional as you can get in the Austen-esque environment. Elizabeth can't help but feel that Darcy is regretting his association with her family, especially since he goes into full Darcy remote mode as the pressure of events ratchets up.

Lydia stays at Pemberley during all this, and she's every bit as much of a drama queen as you'd anticipate. The Bennets come to stay as well, and Mrs. Bennet is just as you'd expect. It only takes a visit from Lady Catherine (played by Penelope Keith, who you'll remember from the Britcoms The Good Life a/k/a Good Neighbors, and To the Manor Born) to make the whole thing seem more like farce than a murder mystery. And I'm not complaining; as I said, I thought it was a hoot.

The acting is standard excellent British costume drama style. I do have a quibble, though. Anna Maxwell Martin plays Elizabeth and, while she's a wonderful actor and I loved her in The Bletchley Circle, she's not right for Elizabeth. Martin just isn't vibrant enough to play that character. She does it as well as she possibly could, but I was aware the whole time that she didn't fit the part. Matthew Rhys as Darcy is an excellent casting choice. I became familiar with him as Philip on FX network's Cold War espionage drama, The Americans, and he has more than enough handsome, brooding intensity for Mr. Darcy.

Crime on Your TV

I've been in a little bit of a mystery reading drought for a few weeks. Instead, I'm on a nonfiction binge. But I have been watching some crime/espionage on TV. Here's my take.


Two Lives

Libby Fischer Hellmann, whose latest novel is Nobody's Child, recommended I see the movie Two Lives, which was on Netflix. And she was right; I can't stop thinking about it.

A little background first. You all know that just one element of Nazi lunacy was their conviction that "Aryans" were superior and that the key to Germany's future was to make a lot more of them. (And have a whole lot fewer of non-Aryans, but that's another story.) Germans were exhorted to have loads of children, and not being married was not a big deal.

The SS founded the Lebensborn movement in Germany and some of its conquered countries, and encouraged women to have racially pure (as they saw it) children in Lebensborn hospitals. The babies would then usually go to a Lebensborn facility and be adopted by selected families, often SS families, in Germany.

There were more Lebensborn children born in Norway than any other country, including Germany. Many of these children were born as a result of romances between Norwegian women and occupying German soldiers. Women in Norway who agreed to allow their children to be adopted didn't realize that they would be sent to Germany.

After World War II, the Norwegian government tried to repatriate the children to Norway, but they weren't entirely successful. This was also a hugely complicated matter, because in the aftermath of the war, women who had had relationships with German soldiers were scorned; thousands were actually arrested as collaborators and often physically attacked. Their children were also frequently mistreated by neighbors and in school.

Two Lives is set mostly in Bergen, Norway, in 1990. Katrine Myrdal lives on the coast in a four-generation house. Katrine's daughter, Anne, is a law student with a baby, and Katrine's mother, Åsa Evensen, has come to live in the house temporarily to help out with the baby. The only man in the house is Bjarte Myrdal, Katrine's husband. Judging from his work attire of a blue double-breasted uniform with loads of gold braid, he's a high-ranking officer in Norway's navy.

It looks like a good life in Bergen. The family is loving, Katrine has an interesting-looking creative job, and she spends some time early every morning sea kayaking in the bay. Into this idyll comes a crusading young lawyer, Sven Solbach. Sven has come to talk to Katrine and Åsa, because Åsa's love affair during the war with a German soldier resulted in Katrine, who was sent to Germany soon after her birth.

Sven wants Åsa and Katrine to be his splashiest clients in a human-rights lawsuit complaining of the treatment of war children and their mothers. He thinks the time is right because, in this year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lebensborn facility records from East Germany are now coming available. And Åsa and Katrine have a particularly compelling story, because Katrine was reunited with her mother as a young woman, years after the war's end. She managed to escape East Germany by stealing a rowboat and pushing off from the coast in bad weather. Only after passing out from hypothermia and exhaustion was she rescued by Danish fishermen.

Katrine just wants Sven to go away, but Anne is interested. As a law student, she finds it an interesting case, and of course it's a fascinating part of her family history. Sven's a good-looking guy, too, which doesn't hurt. In quick flashbacks, we learn that there is a mystery about Kristine; something that she doesn't want anyone, including her family, to know about. As the flashbacks go on, we learn just what that is and the film becomes a tense thriller.

I can't say much more without being spoiler-y. I'll just say that the end titles to the film reveal some shocking historical facts behind this compelling story.

I can't stop thinking about the film, not just because it's a gripping thriller, but because the crisis for Katrine and her family is such a human one, even though it's based on a sensational history. Juliane Köhler, who plays Katrine, is tremendously talented, but the real scene stealer is Liv Ullmann, as her mother, Åsa. Nobody can do so much without a word, and Ullmann's face in her entirely silent final scene will break your heart more thoroughly than the most eloquent words ever could.


The Mysteries of Laura

Last month, we had an old friend visiting, and one evening we decided to try out the first episode of the new series, The Mysteries of Laura, starring Deborah Messing, of Will and Grace fame. The first episode was more or less of a disaster.

The writers went way over the top to make sure we understood that this Laura character isn't anything like any of the characters Messing has played in the past. Laura is an NYPD homicide detective, the best in her precinct. And a good thing, too, because she's out of control in every other way. She's a complete slob (says I, as I sit here in my ancient, fraying track pants, dabbing at the coffee I just dribbled down my front), shoots the ear off a bad guy holding a knife to a bystander when she's too impatient to wait for the hostage negotiators, and she uses police resources to help her find a school and caretakers for her out-of-control twin boys.

When I glanced over at my husband and the friend, they were shaking their heads and looked like they were itching to grab the remote. But I've continued watching, because I kind of like (relate to?) the Laura character and the other cast members, the show can be comical, there are some very interesting NYC location shots, and I'm pretty much of a sucker for police dramas.

The subsequent episodes have been less cartoonish than the first, and the whodunnits fairly interesting, with one major caveat. Each of the first three episodes falls right into one of my TV crime drama whodunnit convention traps, which I described in my "How to Watch TV Crime Dramas" post back in February of 2013. The writers really need to make it just a teensy bit harder for the viewer to figure out whodunnit. If they do, the show may turn out to be a keeper.


How to Get Away with Murder

I know viewers often have to suspend their disbelief when watching TV, and I'm usually able to do that if I like the cast or if a show has an entertaining comedic or dramatic energy. But there is a limit, and ABC's new How to Get Away with Murder sprinted way past my limit in its first episode.

The series is set at the very definitely fictional top-tier Middleton Law School. Shiny new first-year law students pack the auditorium for that classic entry-level course, Criminal Law. In strides their professor, the leather-clad, cold-eyed and tough-talking Annalise Keating, played by Oscar winner Viola Davis.

The prof tells the students that they won't be learning theories, case-law principles, analysis or any of that kind of thing. (You know, the stuff they actually do teach in top-tier law schools). No, instead they'll be learning how to get away with murder, the way it's done in a real criminal law practice––like the one she operates in her spare time from teaching. Apparently, the good professor isn't bothered with the need to publish, like most law professors.

Professor Keating also tells her students that they will be competing to help her with actual cases and that the four best competitors will get the chance to work with her in her firm. Excuse me, but didn't I see that plot line in Legally Blonde? It wasn't a problem there, since that was a comedy, but please don't ask me to swallow it in a drama.

Anyway, off we go with law students ruthlessly stomping all over each other in their mad scramble to get this job. Go ahead, skip your other classes (with Professor Keating's encouragement, which I'm sure her colleagues appreciate), use unethical and downright illegal methods to come up with help for her trial. That will be excellent practice for a month from now, when flash-forwards tell us that four of the best and the brightest in the class will have to figure out just how they themselves can get away with a real murder. Oy.

Show creator Shonda Rhimes is legendary for her shows' (Grey's Anatomy and Scandal) gleeful disregard of reality and proportion––but seriously? It's true that a show about the real law school experience would have about as much action as Slow TV, a reality-show phenomenon that made news with a program depicting a seven-hour train trip from a driver's-seat camera, but How to Get Away with Murder goes too far, too fast in the other direction.


Gracepoint

Just as I expected, Fox Television's remake of the BBC's Broadchurch is lacking in just about everything that made its inspiration work so well. First of all, I don't see the point in even making a show whose every scene and line of dialog is virtually identical to another show. But if the remake is more of a copy made on a low-on-toner printer, it's a complete puzzle.

I can't say it any better than this, from Willa Paskin's review in Slate:

Despite imitating the British original in almost every particular, something has been lost in the U.K.-to-U.S. translation. Through seven episodes there is nothing wildly different about the two shows, but Gracepoint has a facsimile's faded quality. Something about it is less sharp, less bright, less keen, and you are left with a washed-out flier you have seen before.

There has been a slight sanding down of nearly every aspect of the original in this American version. Carver and Ellie's personalities, for example, have both been softened. In Broadchurch, Ellie was played by Olivia Colman in a much feistier, funnier, and warmer register than Anna Gunn's interpretation of the character. Gunn's Ellie is upset to have lost a job to Carver, but not that upset. Perhaps that's because Carver (called D.I. Hardy in Broadchurch) is less persnickety: He's still blunt, but he's not quite as socially maladroit. And without the same tension between the two, Gracepoint also lacks some necessary humor––as well as their dueling perspectives on humanity.

When reviewing Broadchurch, I said that I found the show, despite its focus on a child's murder, "spiritually salubrious." I was impressed with the way the secrets uncovered by the detectives, unsettling as some could be, were knotty and specific. The residents of its cozy small town might not be what they seemed, but they weren't all malevolent or vicious––often, they, too, were coping with grief. But somehow this sense of balance––that it is not just evil that lurks in your neighbor's heart, but sadness, resilience, and love, too––is missing from Gracepoint, which really does feel like yet another series about the awfulness lurking beneath the surface of seemingly placid towns.

That's enough about TV crime dramas for now. I'll come back another time to talk about some of the others I've been watching––in between football games.

Oh, To Be Young Again

It's always fun to pull out those old photo albums and take a squinty-eyed gander at your younger self––un-Photoshopped, of course. It is easy to see, by comparing photos taken over the years, how you got from there to here.

Now we have the opportunity to watch some interpretations of how some of our iconic fictional sleuths got the face they earned. Several months ago I tuned into a new series on PBS about the early life and times of Endeavour Morse. This is a prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse program, which was derived from the Morse novels authored by Colin Dexter. In the series, Shaun Evans portrays young Morse as he begins his career as a Detective Constable with the Oxford City Police CID.

Morse, blessed with the unusual Quaker name of Endeavour, spent some time at Oxford University and some time in the army, where he worked with ciphers before joining the police. Young Morse is at first disillusioned by detective work, but he is quite the natural and seems bound to be a success, although he has quite a time satisfying his superiors. This form of constant disapproval I call the "McCloud Syndrome," because it always reminds me of the TV series McCloud, in which Dennis Weaver plays a marshal out of Taos, New Mexico, who could never please his boss. No matter how many cases he solved with wonderful deductive reasoning, his Chief always treated him as a bumbler.

The episodes I've seen so far do an intriguing job of fleshing out young Morse's character, giving the audience some hints about his background and family life. There is also a vintage red Jaguar in this new show. But it does not belong to Morse––not yet anyway. The series continues in 2014 and I look forward to it. My vote in this case is for the young Morse. He was much more likeable than old Morse, in my view.

A relatively new book series by James Henry introduced me to the younger Jack Frost, another well-known detective, both in the print series written by R. D. Wingfield, and its adaptation for television.

In the third book of Henry's Jack Frost prequel series, Morning Frost, Frost is a Detective Sergeant who has just struggled through one of the low points of his life. It is October of 1982, and Jack had just buried his wife Mary, who had suffered from cancer. There had been a point before her diagnosis when Jack had been planning to ask for a divorce because he had become attached to a female DC who worked out of his precinct. But despite Jack and Mary's many differences, he stayed with her to her death, ended all hope for personal happiness with the DC and sank himself into his work.

Several cases are dumped on Frost at once; very reminiscent of the way R. D. Wingfield treated Frost. There are body parts, female hit men, stolen artwork and the murder of a policeman, and Frost manages to shamble on his way through this to collect all the threads and knot them together. Superintendent Mullet of the Denton police has his usual mixed feelings about Jack. It has been made clear to him that Frost has been tapped for promotion to Detective Inspector for some time, and Mullet would do anything that would quash any recognition of Jack Frost.

Frost appears to be in his late thirties in the James Henry series and not that much older than that in the first of the Wingfield series books, Frost at Christmas. In the original stories, Frost is portrayed as a loveable rogue who is exceedingly sloppy and inefficient in his work habits, and with a personality that is at times sarcastic, insolent and conniving––which doesn’t affect the squad he works with, since they are incredibly loyal to him. This is not a total surprise, because readers tend to like Frost more than they expect to.

In the TV series, Touch of Frost, Frost is portrayed by David Jason, who appears a decade or two older than the fictional Frost, aging naturally over the course of a total of 15 years of the series. On TV, Superintendent Mullet is seen in a kinder, gentler light and Frost himself has more respect for women. The female characters in the books usually have little to recommend them. My vote in this case is ambiguous. I think both the printed series are excellent, but as a character I like the old Frost better. That may be because James Henry gets more into the personality of the man than Wingfield did. Ignorance is bliss.

Now on to the interesting battle of the Montalbanos. Salvo Montabano is the protagonist of the popular Andrea Camilleri novels based in the fictional town, Vigàta in Sicily. He is a Commissario in the police force, a rank comparable to a superintendent of a regional force. Montalbano has his own way of doing things, as he has to navigate without compromising himself through the murky politics of life in Italy, where the crime bosses sometimes have more power than the politicians, let alone the police. He has those rare characteristics of honesty, decency and loyalty.

Luca Zingaretti

These stories have depth because Camilleri makes it a point to "smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary of my times." There has been a television show based on Camilleri's books for about 15 years. Acting the part of Montalbano is Luca Zingaretti, whose image is synonymous with Montalbano.

In 2012, Italian television aired a spin-off featuring a young Montalbano, who was to have somewhat of a Che Guevara appeal. Michele Riondino was cast in the role, and young Montalbano has all the fine characteristics that make the mature Montalbano the person that he is. He has an energy, mixed with his style and appeal, that is eminently watchable.

Michele Riondino

Before I can vote on which of these characters I prefer, I am going to have to bone up on my Italian because these shows are only available with English subtitles. In this case, at least the older and the younger Montalbano face off weekly in Italy so there is an abundance of opportunities to compare the different stages of Montalbano's life.

Book Review of Rebecca Eaton's Making Masterpiece

Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS by Rebecca Eaton

Whenever I pick up a history, memoir or biography, the first thing I do is look at the pictures. Naturally, that's what I did when I got home from the library with Making Masterpiece. I was puzzled, because the first photos in the book are of the author as a young girl. I thought this was a book about producing PBS's Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! series, not about the author's life. It turns out that it's both and it also turns out that's mostly a good thing.

Eaton, born in 1947, was a Vassar student when a school apprenticeship program allowed her to intern at the BBC and get her introduction to media production. Returning home to Boston, she got a job at WGBH (jokingly referred to when I was growing up as God Bless Harvard), which we now know as one of PBS's flagship stations and original home to Julia Child's The French Chef and This Old House, among many others.

Who knew Julia Child had so much company on TV?

WGBH decided that what America needed on television was British costume dramas, and what the new Masterpiece Theatre program did, starting in 1971, was to import them from London. At first, these were almost entirely miniseries that had been produced by the BBC and shown in the UK. PBS producers would fly to London for long teas, dinners and meetings to see what might be available and make choices. As the years went by, PBS began to coproduce with their British counterparts, and not rely entirely on already-produced material.

Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson in Upstairs Downstairs

Most of us remember the first huge hit on Masterpiece Theatre: Upstairs, Downstairs, from 1974, and the host who introduced each week's episode, that comforting combination of wise old uncle and Oxford don, Alistair Cooke. Do you remember also how the show was always sponsored by Mobil Oil? It turns out that PBS itself didn't fund the show at all; it was pretty much all Mobil. Back in the 1970s, and for the next 20 years, Big Oil thought it would be good image-burnishing to sponsor uplifting––but still popular––television.

Alistair Cooke hosting Masterpiece Theatre

When original Masterpiece Theatre executive producer Joan Wilson died, Rebecca Eaton stepped into her shoes, taking responsibility for both Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery!  It was a
daunting assignment for Eaton, who hadn't ever understood the appeal of mysteries, who had just discovered she and relatively new husband Paul were expecting a baby, and who felt she didn't have nearly enough experience to take over from Wilson.

Executive positions in television weren't all that common for women in the early 1970s, and starting the job when pregnant was a real anomaly––Eaton followed convention and didn't tell any of the BBC and other television contacts in England about her condition, even when morning sickness forced her to flee meetings abruptly.

Eaton is very frank about her failures, like having to be talked into Prime Suspect, with Helen Mirren, and turning down the Colin Firth Pride & Prejudice miniseries because Masterpiece Theatre had shown a version years earlier. She even discloses that she had a run-in with contacts at Mobil about editorial influence, and Mobil insisted that PBS fire her. She wasn't fired, but she was put on probation and told she very much needed to work on her people skills. I don't think I'd want to confess something like that, so I had to admire Eaton's openness.

Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect

Eaton is also open about the difficulty of balancing work and home life; the toll it took in missed time with her daughter, miscarriages, her marriage. Occasionally, it felt like too much personal information––but then that's better than those stories from certain celebrities and high-powered executive women who talk about how you can have it all, when you know they do it with a truckload of cash and a team of assistants at work and at home.

"But what about the shows and the actors?" I hear you wondering. The book doesn't disappoint there. Eaton breezily recounts story after story about Helen Mirren, Diana Rigg, Kenneth Branagh, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Princess Margaret (a big fan of Inspector Morse), Daniel Radcliffe, and the entire Downton Abbey cast.

Eaton has such an enormous respect for British actors; their devotion to the work, flexibility and lack of star attitude. She tells a particularly memorable story about Diana Rigg soldiering on without a word of complaint, though her husband had only just deserted her, at age 52 and with a 12-year-old daughter at home, for 20-something Joely Richardson. (Man, that British actor community is a small world! That 12-year-old daughter, Rachael Stirling, is now an actress who was recently featured in The Bletchley Circle––which was shown on PBS, by the way. And Joely Richardson, daughter of the famed Vanessa Redgrave, went on to marry producer Tim Bevan (Love, Actually), who dumped her for a younger woman. Their daughter, Daisy Bevan, is––not surprisingly––also an actress.)

Diana Rigg hosting Mystery!

Once cable TV came on the scene, soon after Eaton became executive producer, the mission of Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! became much more challenging. Mobil felt it less and less necessary to spend millions as patrons of the arts and PBS didn't increase funding. After Eaton foolishly passed on the Pride & Prejudice miniseries, Arts & Entertainment snapped it up. (That was back when the "Arts" in that station's title actually meant something.) HBO, Showtime and other far better-funded outlets began to compete with PBS for British product.

Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock

And now, in the era of hundreds of TV stations, live streaming video, and so much competition for the consumer's entertainment dollars, Rebecca Eaton keeps on trying to find those dramas and mysteries that will keep viewers tuning in week after week. She's done a good job in recent years, what with Cranford, Inspector Lewis, Sherlock and the blockbuster Downton Abbey (not a favorite of mine, but there's no denying it's a phenomenal success in the US), and her obvious love of her job and dedication to the mission of bringing excellent programming to PBS promise more to come.

While it wasn't quite what I expected, Making Masterpiece ends up being a fascinating story of how Masterpiece (with what is now called three subdivisions: Classic, Contemporary and Mystery) is produced, filled with yummy gossipy bits about actors we're all familiar with, and a clear-eyed confession of the personal costs to a woman of having a demanding job over the last quarter century.

Making it a personal story illustrates how a little jog here and a bit of happenstance there can push a life in an unexpected direction, especially the discovery of a career that could never have been a dream job because it's a job you didn't even know existed. So even though I hadn't expected so much of Rebecca Eaton's own life to be represented in the book, it added a lot of texture and insight and made the book that much more interesting to read.

Laurence Fox,
the next Lord Peter?

Now that I feel I've gotten to know Rebecca Eaton––and that she's learned her lesson about foolishly turning down remakes––maybe I can persuade her to mount a new production of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, casting Laurence Fox (Hathaway in Inspector Lewis) as Lord Peter.

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