“Dalgliesh,” “L&O” Moving Forward

I haven’t yet begun watching the new, six-part British mystery series Dalgliesh (available here in the States via Acorn TV), but Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell evidently has, and she’s impressed.

“[Detective Chief Inspector Adam] Dalgliesh,” Mitchell wrote recently, “is played by Bertie Carvel, who you might recognize from Doctor Foster; he has also had guest roles in loads of shows, from Sherlock to Waking the Dead to Doctor Who. He is as close to a perfect Dalgliesh as I can imagine, capturing the layers of the character without overplaying it. The script is owed kudos on this front too; it would have been easy to get lost in Dalgliesh’s dark and complex back story, but this is handed as elegantly as I’ve seen it in any show.”

The Killing Times strikes a similarly upbeat note in its critique of Episode 1. “Made in Northern Ireland by a mainly female crew for Acorn TV,” it explains, “it has to be said that this is a solid and satisfying mystery, with Bertie Carvel well cast as the saturnine and immaculately dressed Dalgliesh, plenty of pleasing period detail, moody photography, and a tingling air of suspense and threat. We look forward to the rest of the series (three two-parters, shown on Thursday and Friday nights), with all the relish of a pathologist anticipating a juicy post-mortem.” The site’s review of Episode 2 is here.

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In other small-screen news, In Reference to Murder reports that “Former Burn Notice star, Jeffrey Donovan, has been tapped as a lead in NBC’s upcoming Law & Order revival, playing a new character, an NYPD detective, on Season 21 of Dick Wolf’s venerable crime drama. The new season is expected to also feature several alums from the original series, with Sam Waterston and Anthony Anderson believed to be in talks to return. The new installment of Law & Order, from Wolf and writer-showrunner Rick Eid, will continue the classic bifurcated format and will once again examine ‘the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.’”

Well, it seems that whether or not I agree Law & Order needs to resurface on network TV, rather than making room for something new and (in the best case) novel, it’s going to happen, anyway. So I might as well keep up with the latest developments here.