A few years ago, I remember a boring and empty evening at my condo in Antelope trying to decide on what to watch for some less than memorable hours to pass the night. I had recently cut the cord with Comcast for its cable service, but still was connected to the internet line the conglomerate carrier provided. The price for both internet and cable, with its feeble TV offerings provided to me at exorbitant rates while I was on a strict fixed income, was unsustainable. I discovered a viewing service on the web, and decided I’d give Britbox a go. Amazingly, this new entertainment option worked out beyond my wildest expectations.
Over my lifetime a funny thing had happened to American television, and especially to programs broadcast on the public over-the-air waves: TV became almost unwatchable for maybe 22 out of every 24 hours on any given day for any sentient creature who had a life and modest mental faculties. A combination of advertising time becoming a 50/50 proposition on any show, and that a half-hour sitcom was now reduced to three 5 minute segments to convey a minuscule idea and get a laugh had become too painful for me. Also, the vast majority of programming broadcast on the public air-wave front was now pseudo entertainment talk or fake reality, phony sports crap selling dreams and nightmares of tormented fabricated drama with only money as its goal. Original drama, comedy and all of their sub genres of fiction had all but disappeared from the television broadcast landscape of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC here in the US of A.
There had been cable, but during the last 10 years cable offerings had gotten very sparse, too sparse to keep the service. The glory days of channels like FX, TNT and AMC on cable with shows like Nip/Tuck, The Shield, Castle, Bones, Rescue Me, Damages, Breaking Bad and Mad Men to watch just a little over a decade ago were gone. The last vestiges of that era close this year with the ending seasons on Killing Eve and Better Call Saul.
It is all pay per view streaming now with rates on the inevitable sharp incline by a few big companies controlling the pipes where the flotsam/jetsam flows. And so, I go on to streams like Britbox , Amazon Prime & Netflix for most of my viewing now. One of the interesting programming notes these days on American broadcast and cable television (to me) is the total lack of mystery fare. Tons of law enforcement cop shows of all stripes with heavy doses of doctor & hospital hours sprinkled with comic book episodes but no real mysteries that happen anymore. What I find truly pitiable is seeing the original Law & Order series resuscitated after being put out of its misery in 2010 after 20 years on air.
So, streaming off the cable grid it is.
Britbox and Amazon Prime have remedied my television/movie mystery fix and have given me some great authors of fiction to explore heavily over these COVID years of confinement. Georges Simenon created Chief Inspector Jules Maigret in the early 1930s and wrote the last Maigret novel (Maigret and Monsieur Charles) in 1972. The books are all superbly written with keen observations on the human condition. Over the last several months I’ve read around 15 of the 78 Maigret novels Simenon produced currently and all are focused on various individuals entering the orbit of the famous French detective.
Two different interpretations of Simenon’s detective creation are found on Britbox. Michael Gambon played Maigret for 2 seasons and 12 episodes in 1992 and 1993. I played them all and they held my attention. They were good, not great but that might be due to how different television looks today versus 30 years ago. Gambon certainly looks more the part of the character Simenon envisioned and is an outstanding actor. Good television, even after all these years. However, I was stunned to watch the latest British version of Maigret, which originally aired from 2016 & 2017, with Rowan Atkinson in the lead role.
Atkinson has been a brilliant comedic star for decades through iconic characters like Mr. Bean and the Black Adder. I had never seen him in a dramatic role, and thought when I first put this latest Maigret on that a Peter Sellers type of performance might be in the offing. Spoiler alert! Wrong, wrong and wrong. Rowan Atkinson was the perfect Maigret in temperament, delivery, style, nuance and mood that anyone could ask for. He became Maigret. Sadly there are only 4 episodes, but they do run approximately 90 minutes in length instead of the 50 minute episodes from the early 1990s. These 4 Maigret stories I found exceptional from the screenplay and performances to the great camera work and sound.
Those two seasons became my motivators for reading the Simenon novels, for which I’m eternally grateful.
Another long running detective series from British television on Britbox is Inspector Morse, who was played by John Thaw throughout the show’s run (1987-2000). The crimes are usually all set in the area of Oxford colleges in Oxford City. The TV show episodes are mostly 90 minutes in length and are very well done and interesting but, for me, the books hit it out of the park.
Inspector Morse is a bit like Sherlock Holmes, brilliant but
not a pleasant person to be around if your lamp is burning a bit low. Morse’s
Watson is Inspector Lewis, although Lewis is not the chronicler of the tales.
Morse is a serious language specialist, crossword puzzle expert and classical
music buff who found Wagner the ultimate classical composer. Holmes addiction
was cocaine, while Morse pursued classic ales and single malt Scotches throughout
every investigation with more relish than his pursuit of the criminal adversaries. I loved
every book in the collection. The television series, being older video fare, looks and feels its age, although I thoroughly loved the pilot, or first Morse installment, The Dead Of Jericho,Very unique story with camera work, and, curiously, not the first Morse novel.
Funny, although Inspector Morse is one of those prominent fictional literary figures which helped tell and sell the Oxford Colleges’ story for nearly a thousand years, the author, Colin Dexter went to Cambridge. Apparently, in the early years of these two educational forces existence around the 13th century, a group of educators from Oxford felt compelled to leave and start up a rival college, and hence Cambridge came into existence. Side notes, Rowan Atkinson is an Oxford alum. John Thaw, aka Inspector Morse, died at 60 years of age just 2 years after the show’s last episode. This may account for the fact there were no more Inspector Morse novels coming from the author. Both Colin Dexter and Georges Simenon lived 17 years after closing down their famed detectives.
An American detective that has seen some video love from a streaming source other than the broadcast/cable tunnel of despair is Hieronymus Bosch from the LAPD. Michael Connelly has authored 23 books featuring the eccentric single-minded detective plying his genius in greater Los Angeles. Connelly also has created novels from various principle characters found in several of Bosch’s investigations, such as Rene Ballard and Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer.
I have to admit, many of these characters I find much more interesting than the indomitable and singularly driven Detective Bosch. Bosch is named after the Dutch painter who plied his talents during the 15th & 16th centuries with some startling devotional paintings depicting good & evil at play. It's a clever and great literary device to get into the personality/mind of the character we follow on the hunt. The Bosch stories both as novels and 7 seasons on Amazon Prime are more studies of police procedure than mysteries per se. Titus Welliver is exceptionally good as Harry Bosch and the supporting casts through the seven seasons are all top notch. I must say, quite a few alums from The Wire appear over the years, which always tells me a high level of production and skill went into the shows.
As I started writing this latest blog chapter, I started thinking about the many detectives in books or on film I've enjoyed over the years and wondered why here in this country we've almost murdered the genre currently. I grew up as a kid reading The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Sherlock Holmes & many of the cheap paperbacks my mother had read featuring Hercule Poirot or Perry Mason. My mom was a sucker for both Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner who-done-its. By the time she went through a Mickey Spillane cycle I was on to Ian Fleming's James Bond. In the 1970s, I caught the Sam Spade, Nick Charles and Phillip Marlowe bug from the pages of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I found Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer as an exceptional private investigator who understood human motivation and reality. I've reread those mysteries a few times. P.D. James arrived shortly after that on my radar with her policeman detective/poet, Adam Dalgliesh, and then Walter Mosley with Easy Rawlins, both of whom I enjoyed a lot. And then came Bosch.
As I mentioned above, today's menu options of televised mystery material is sparse to nil currently. After the decades of Columbo, Murder She Wrote, Monk etc going all the way back to Perry Mason in the 1950s to only have the banal offerings of "Cupcake" mysteries on the insipid Hallmark Channel is a mind boggler to me, particularly since British television is chock full of mysteries in every stripe. If it is not a comic book hero, a police/government law enforcement hero or doctor hero it cannot be on the air in the USA seems to be the rule of the hour. Pathetic.
A final observation regarding the near death status of the American mystery genre. The French Chief Inspector Jules Maiget has empathy in all his stories for both victim and criminal. Many of the mysteries are filled with subtle nuances of motive and deep looks into the real or imagined actions of the characters found surrounding the crime. The English Chief Inspector Morse finds solace in classical music, crossword puzzle expertise, fine Scotch single malts with craft ales while also having a keen sympathy for both victims and perpetrators in the Oxford surroundings of the novels.
You find no sympathy or empathy from Bosch, as either a private investigator or as a police detective working the homicide beat in Hollywood or the great L.A. basin. Bosch loves jazz & maybe his daughter while having an encyclopedic knowledge of Los Angeles, just no appreciation for anything in the city except the view and takeout menus. His various love interests in the books all seem sterile, and the various escapades feel doomed from the start without gaining any true personal insights other than career matters most to all the characters. The books and series are excellent procedural reports which are far far removed from the Marlowes, Spades and Archers of yesterday. Maybe America will get a great detective with some humanity once again, but for now Bosch reigns over the mystery landscape finding the worst in his and our surroundings.
Thanks for the visit. March has been busy but we'll visit soon again.
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