In our age of grimdark, when even comedies are built on a bedrock of confrontation and discomfort (see The Drama and The Invite), we take light-hearted fun where we can get it, and cozy whodunits remain one of our last bastions of frothy entertainment. The formula is simple: supply a brain-twisting mystery, add a light dash of humor, conclude with an unveiling of guilty parties, rinse and repeat. But how to avoid banality? Throw in a quirky sleuth, whether it’s a rumpled genius like Peter Falk’s Columbo or Tony Shaloub’s obsessive-compulsive Adrian Monk. Quirkiness has its pitfalls, however. With so many variations on eccentric detective heroes out there, coming up with a fresh, original take can be just as tricky as concocting a satisfying puzzle of a plot, if not more so. Get it right and you have a character built to engender audience goodwill and several seasons of crime-solving; get it wrong, and you end up with a pile of tics in search of a character. Such is the challenge Professor T and Ludwig, two current Brit mystery series set in Cambridge, have set for themselves.
“Quirky” is the appropriate adjective to describe Professor T, the ongoing ITV remake of the 2015 Belgian TV series. Much like another famous Belgian detective, Professor T (Jasper Tempest, a criminology lecturer) has a fastidious manner and an unerring instinct for picking apart the fine details that snare wrongdoers. But while Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is an endearing collection of Continental idiosyncrasies and bonhomie, Ben Miller’s Tempest is a more damaged and standoffish sort, nearly crippled by OCD, preferring his own company and counsel, equally blunt towards killers, bereaved family members, and the local detectives who reluctantly require his assistance. Lightening the mood every so often are fanciful fantasies in which Tempest’s subconscious runs wild: a high school musical number about infidelity (replete with cheerleaders) or a romantic rooftop waltz with his ex-fiancee Christina (Juliet Aubrey), who happens to be the detective inspector he works with, or mirror debates with himself, each Professor T straining to outdo the other in pedantry.
Professor T‘s mysteries aren’t very involving; what really matters is the way Miller bounces off the other principals, including his theatrical mess of a mother (an imperious Frances de la Tour), his former student-turned-promising-copper Lisa (Bridgerton‘s Emma Naomi), and his prickly office assistant Ingrid (Sarah Woodward, deploying all-knowing glares and snarls). Coming off his turn as a fussy detective in Death in Paradise, Miller can play an emotionally constipated character in his sleep, but he’s also subtle enough to suggest layers of vulnerability and likability under Tempest’s severe demeanor. Good thing too, because Professor T isn’t just a murder-a-week show but an ongoing exploration of Tempest’s psychology, with Tempest struggling to come to grips with a tragic death in his past that may not have occurred the way he remembers it.
Being human is overrated. It is messier than being a fish.
Jasper Tempest
For its first few seasons, Professor T is an amiable, lushly photographed ride that stays just on the right side of winsome. Sure, we’re encouraged to invest ourselves in Tempest’s slow journey towards full-fledged human, but not too much; after all, he wouldn’t be Professor T if he stopped acting like Professor T, would he? For all its nods at past traumas, the series charms most when it stays playful and superficial, whether it’s the old-school Italian pop songs that dot the soundtrack, the airy arguments T has with his dean (Douglas Reith, the very picture of an erudite and exasperated intellectual), or the will they-won’t they romance between Lisa and her colleague Dan (Barney Winters).
Sadly, the show can’t leave it at that. Professor T’s third season climaxes with a shocking revelation and death, and since then the balance between drama and merry mystery-solving has been thrown off (not a huge surprise, given that the original Professor T concluded after three seasons). Tempest gains himself a new girlfriend in the form of his psychologist Helena (Juliet Stevenson in a thankless role); Winters must overcome traumas of his own; and even Reith dithers around with a love interest (Zoe Wanamaker, doing her usual dotty flibbertigibbet thing as Tempest’s aunt). Character development isn’t a bad thing in of itself, but Professor T makes the fatal mistake of confusing soap opera with depth. In the more recent seasons of the show, each weekly murder case is now an afterthought, as none-too-thrilling developments hog the running time: Is the dean actually Tempest’s father? Will Tempest free himself from some of his phobias by learning how to play the drums, and will Helena avoid being jealous of his cute drum teacher? Will Tempest decide to move to Boston with Helena? Will Dan get into hot water when he starts dating a gangster’s daughter?
In all fairness, the current fifth season of Professor T is a slight return to form after the doldrums of the fourth season: the mysteries are better thought-out and Miller still does a creditable job of maintaining our sympathies even the writers contrive to put Tempest through the drudgery of character development. We can stomach a detective who’s maladjusted, but a detective who’s forced at every turn to become a better person can be a drag after a while. It might be too much to hope for an improvement come season 6 (which is already in production), but if nothing else, Professor T proves that Miller is an excellent talent who deserves a better show to support him.
If Professor T‘s quirks lie completely within the boundaries of its titular character, Ludwig‘s nuttiness lies in its very conceit. Try this one on for size: John Taylor (David Mitchell) is a hermit-like whiz who designs puzzles for newspapers under the non-de-plume “Ludwig,” but when his twin brother James (also Mitchell), who happens to be a respected police detective, goes missing without a trace, James’s desperate wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) implores him to impersonate James at work in an effort to find out what happened to him. Naturally, this leads to John showing off his abilities at puzzle-solving as he tackles the latest murder cases, even as he struggles to avoid being outed as a fake while investigating his brother’s disappearance, which may be linked to conspiracies in high corridors of power.
As with Professor T, the case of the week matters little in Ludwig, even if many of the mysteries make clever use of logic puzzles; what’s more important is how Ludwig negotiates his tricky status as an undercover mole (and maybe discovers a bit of gumption in the process). Series writer Mark Brotherhood (who also wrote the soap opera-sitcom Mount Pleasant) is no stranger to funny stuff, and he brings the same comfy humor to Ludwig. John, Lucy and her precocious son Henry (Dylan Hughes) risk exposure and possible harm throughout the show, but in true shambling, put-upon Brit style, they seem more crochety than terrified about the prospect.
As John’s successes at “work” pile up and further layers of intrigue are unpeeled, Ludwig becomes a tweener kind of show: too preoccupied with its underlying plot to be that concerned with mind-bending mysteries, too flippant to get overly tense about John and Lucy’s predicament. Indeed, the series is so light that it risks floating off into the ether, but fortunately the actors tether it. Ordinarily a convincing presence in period pieces and modern dramas, Martin has displayed her comedy chops in more recent projects like Motherland, and she’s a hoot as Lucy, both steel-willed and a bit flighty, a suburban housewife re-discovering her aptitude for skullduggery. And then there’s Mitchell, who holds the whole ramshackle construction together. As demonstrated in the classic comedy series Peep Show, he’s adept at finding humor in social ineptitude, and in Ludwig, he’s an awkward marvel, with every frozen stare and ill-advised stammer a masterclass in minimal gestures and maximum discomfort.
Lucy: You’re the one that’s supposed to be a genius round here.
John: Two points above, actually. But I find that never helps when it comes to… chatting.
For all its easygoing humor, Ludwig contains a touch of pathos, as John and Lucy’s playacting forces them to consider the more assured people they could have been. But unlike Professor T, Ludwig doesn’t linger overmuch on such delicate matters; nor does it shirk from plot twists that drive the story forward without sabotaging its tone. Instead of drawing out John’s impersonation of his brother over multiple seasons, the show’s first season concludes with him outed as a fake, leading to new challenges and unexpected consequences. Meanwhile, Lucy gets a meatier role in the current second season as she cajoles her way into becoming a “journalist” to play detective herself. Such change-ups are crucial to the lifeblood of a show, and although Ludwig isn’t reinventing the wheel, it knows how to keep it spinning in appealing fashion.
Ludwig appears committed to remaining a lark, but a lark with an expiration date; one presumes that eventually the show’s central mysteries will be solved, and it remains to be seen if the resolution is worthy of the build-up. But even if it isn’t, Mitchell and Martin’s repartee provides enough comic juice to keep Ludwig puttering along as an agreeable time-waster—and isn’t that what a cozy whodunit is supposed to be? ■
