What I thought was just bad allergies on Friday turned into a full-blown head-cold throughout the weekend and even into Monday. Yay, 3-day weekend spent barely being able to move off the couch. Woohoo!
Seriously, there needs to be a sarcasm font.
I’m a comfort food kind of a guy when it comes to sick TV. For me that’s episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Buffy (with some Angel and an odd 30 Rock and Excel Saga thrown in for flavor).
You can tell I was sick by the fact that my TNG watching mainly focused on Season 1 and 2 episodes, which my wife mistook for TOS episodes from the other room. No blame there. Also, there’s really no justified time to be watching Excel Saga even in small doses.
I don’t tend to consume new things when sick, but I did pick one off the back-burner to try, and it was by the far the best way to distract myself from being miserable: BBC’s Luther staring Idris Elba.
Pros:
- Morally ambiguous main character. “Does dirty things but isn’t a dirty cop.”
- Opening theme by Massive Attack, title sequence kind of reminds me of Jessica Jones.
- Female foil equal parts antagonist and ally.
- Crime procedural focused more on psychological elements rather than CSI’ing everything. We’re not trying to figure out who did the crime (we’re usually shown this pretty early). We’re waiting for our characters to find the baddie and figure out how they’ll ultimately take them down.
- Wonderfully shot from the first scene. Mixes old and modern London.
- Series long arcs particularly in the first series with great payoff and confrontations.
- Characters experience some growth and change between series, particularly DS Ripley.
Cons:
- Seriously! Only 16 episodes for 4 series! We’ve watched 12 of the 14 on Netflix and will probably buy the remaining two from Amazon. Pay Idris whatever he wants and make more!
- Not really a con, but I do think I liked the six separate case structure of the first series as opposed to the two 2-part episodes in Series 2 and 3. Might feel different if there were 6 episodes (three stories) in series 2-3 (more in the Inspector Lewis model).
One other thing we noticed is that the show doesn’t always have the positive outcomes that American shows always do. In America, if we see both the abduction and later scenes with the character still alive in captivity, we know the detective is going to get to them in time. Don’t assume the same thing for Luther. The show doesn’t operate in a fantasy world, even though some fantastical things happen.
I know this has been out there for a while, but if you have a Netflix account and have never seen it, you really should try it out. We were hooked by the first few episodes.
Here’s to getting through the day then collapsing back on the couch.
[BTW] : Ben Trube, Writer 