In London, a call to police sheds doubt on whether the right man was convicted in the murder of a woman several years previously. A young, Black Detective Sergeant is given the routine task of looking into it, and so she approaches the original investigating officer, DCI Hegarty, ably portrayed by Peter Capaldi. After getting …
I watched this whole thing so you don’t have to. There are some excellent performances, particularly Adeel Aktar as the rumpled police detective and Joanna Lumley at her plumiest as the wealthy mother-in-law. The problem was that there was just TOO MUCH. Entire side stories should have been dropped, sometimes things seemed out of order, …
A police procedural set in Scotland. What sets this one apart from the rest is that the lead detective, Annika, ably played by Nicola Walker, speaks directly to the viewer, breaking the fourth wall. Full of literary references, Annika is smart, funny, wry. She’s raising her teenage daughter alone, navigating a new job with old …
In four different times (Victorian, WWII, Present Day, Future) the same body appears in a London alley. Detectives in each time period investigate. As viewers, we can see the threads that link the mysteries, but the detectives have a harder time figuring out what is going on. It was interesting and fun while it lasted, …
Octavia Spencer stars as Poppy, a NY Times journalist turned true crime podcaster. Poppy has recently returned to the Bay Area, where she grew up and where her family lives, and each season presents a different mystery that she aims to solve. Poppy can be a frustrating character – she has a tendency to fixate …
Natasha Lyonne stars in this episodic mystery of the week show. She’s on the road, for reasons that are developed in the first episode, and somehow, wherever she goes there happens to be a murder to solve. She has the ability to tell if someone is lying, and by the end of each episode she’s …
Someone is murdered at a party and each episode is a different witness/suspect telling the story of the evening, Rashomon-style, with the added benefit that each story is a different genre (action, romantic comedy etc). A genuinely amusing whodunnit.
Another in a long list of shows that have a police detective semi-unwillingly assisted by (and assisting) a plucky female amateur detective. In this one, set in Victorian England, the plucky woman is Miss Eliza Scarlett, a private detective, and the detective is William Wellington of Scotland Yard – sometimes called “Duke” because of his …
Loosely based on the amazing Jon Krakauer book (one of my favorite books), this focuses on the investigation of the murder that was at the core of the book. A young wife is killed by her husband’s brothers based on fundamentalist interpretations of Mormon theology. This show creates fictional detectives, one of them a pious …
Gritty British police procedural with Idris Elba as the detective, Luther. Luther is a deeply flawed character, but he’s fighting the good fight and the acting, writing and supporting characters are extremely well done.