SDP on TV: Inspector Lewis

The PBS series Mystery brought a lot of great English detectives to American TV.  For many years I enjoyed their interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Adam Dalgliesh.  But my certain favorite was Inspector Morse.  Morse, played with exquisite brilliance by the late John Thaw, was a brooding, over-educated Oxford man, with a weakness for English beer.  What's not to love?  The sound track was also pure genius, incorporating a kind of morse code beeping into a deeply moving theme.  It helps that I traveled to Oxford just about the time that the series got started. 

Morse had a sidekick: Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately).  Lewis was presented as the opposite Morse, with little higher education and no taste for opera.  But Whately skillfully built his character into formidable presence. 

Some of the Morse scripts were based on the novels of Colin Dexter, who created the character; but others were "inspired" by the novels.  If Thaw had lived longer, we might have gotten more of them.  As it is, PBS is bringing us a new series: Inspector Lewis.  Lewis has now replaced Morse, and has his own sidekick: James Hathaway (Laurence Fox).  Here the tables are turned: Hathaway is a Cambridge man, who knows a little Greek and can quote Nietzsche.  Needless to say, the learning is relevant as he and his boss untangle the webs woven by Oxford Dons and other upper crust villains. I have seen the first two.  Both were good, but the second was dynamite. There are at least two more to go. 

This is very good film making.  It is solidly English detective genre in plot, and so it carries all the social friction of our mother country.  High and low culture, privilege and poverty, the smoker Hathaway navigating all the tobacco-free zones, all that is there but it always the background.  What matters is who done it.  Don't miss Inspector Lewis.