The Chelsea Detective & Wild Bill

Neither great but one at least gets a 3 rating

I think it’s my role to wave you off sometime from the stinkers in the detective mystery genre. This is one of those times. But I’ll end with something good.

The Chelsea Detective is in its third season on the direct-to-streaming Acorn TV platform. Adrian Scarborough stars as dyslexic DI Max Arnold. Now a days, it seems customary for crime procedurals – at least the ones I watch from BBC, ITV and the like – to have lots of back story and regulars with interesting quirks. Here everyone has personal issues, though none tragic. They talk about them a lot. DI Arnold seems to have considerable difficulty recognizing his great passion for his wife – they seem to be terminally separated – even as it threatens to overwhelm him. The special quirk is the deaf forensic specialist who has the gift of being able to turn off listening to people by simply flipping a switch on her hearing aids. (My favorite similar is the flamboyant police forensic pathologist played with great panache by Darrell D'Silva in Van der Valk.)

Seemed odd to see Scarborough playing a lead role. I recall him playing weak-chinned toads in Midsomer Murders, New Tricks and the like. But he sports a beard in this show and the series is apparently popular in the UK where it will be filming a fourth season this year. But as its generic style title suggests – they could do no better than The Chelsea Detective? – it is full of cliché dialogue especially as the four main characters chat with each other. The show does show off Chelsea – Arnold lives in a boat and bicycles everywhere – leaving me thinking we should visit London again soon. And the crimes themselves leave one guessing almost to the end. For these latter two reasons, I rate the series a 3.

The stinker is Wild Bill, staring Rob Lowe as an American police chief fired from his previous job then hired as Chief Constable in a English city with crime problems (apparently this was a thing). It’s always been my impression that the English upper class – or maybe its the middle class, I never underastood the British class sytem – really don’t like Americans much. Lowe’s Chief Constable is presented rather unfavorably, or so it seemed to me. He cuts corners and mostly cares about crime statistics and he’s not much of a detective but a shoot-from-the-hips bureaucrat. The show was cancelled after its first season. I stopped after the first two episodes. The only reason I can think of to watch this is if you’d want to see Rob Lowe in a British police uniform. Unrated.

The good news is new seasons of The Brokenwood Mysteries available on both PBS and Acorn TV. Off to New Zealand again!