Article first published as DIRK GENTLY'S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY Review on Seat42F.
BBC America has a new series coming this
weekend entitled DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY. No, this
isn’t the first show to be adapted from the Douglas Adams books, but it
certainly is an interesting one.
If you haven’t read the Dirk Gently
books, one that shares a title with this show, a second called The Long
Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and a third that was only partially finished
before the author’s passing, but was posthumously published anyway,
called The Salmon of Doubt, you may be asking yourself what exactly is a
holistic detective? Or, after seeing the names of the other books in
the series, you may have already chalked up the author as a weirdo whose
titles aren’t expected to strictly make sense. Both are probably
correct attitudes to have.
According to Dirk (played here by Penny
Dreadful’s Samuel Barnett), a holistic detective is one who looks at the
whole picture. He follows any tangent that occurs to him, and it
somehow all works out. The universe provides, so to speak. And for some
reason, he can be hired to solve a murder by the guy who is killed.
(Don’t ask.)
Thankfully (for obvious reasons), Dirk
is not our protagonist. That honor belongs to Todd (Elijah Wood,
Wilfred, The Lord of the Rings), a simple hotel worker who gets pulled
into Dirk’s craziness quite unintentionally. Todd is our everyman who
doesn’t understand why very, very strange things start happening around
him, and doesn’t want anything to do with a man who just moves into
one’s Seattle apartment without asking. So he’s our grounded anchor in a
very bizarre show.
Although I have not read this book
series, it does not appear that the new show is based on the novels,
plot-wise. Todd isn’t mentioned in any novel description. Instead, it
just takes the inane character of Dirk and drops him into our real
world, with all new wackiness. Considering how The Hitchhiker’s Galaxy
movie was received, perhaps that’s for the best, though I would likely
be annoyed if I were someone who had read the books.
The show itself does a lot of the
trademark Adams wit (I did read and enjoyed all of Hitchhiker’s, so I
feel I can say that), with a bunch of mumbo jumbo dialogue that sounds
good, but doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny, in a good way. Some of
the laughs are obtained by pointing out absurdity in the real world in
the context of the insane Dirk, and some are just derived from weird
situations.
It also resembles humorist Dave Barry’s
wonderful debut novel, Big Trouble, in that it features a great many
characters, each with their own motivations, who somehow all come into
one another’s orbit. In the pilot, we meet Todd’s sister, Amanda (Hannah
Marks, Necessary Roughness), who is struggling with an odd affliction.
We also meet a holistic assassin, Bart Curlish (Fiona Dourif, True
Blood), and Todd’s neighbor, Farah Black (Jade Eshete, Shades of Blue),
and a scared nerd, Ken (Mpho Koaho, Falling Skies), and a weird man,
Gordon (Aaron Douglas, Battlestar Galactica), and Zimmerfield (Richard
Schiff, The West Wing), and Riggins (Miguel Sandoval, Medium), and
Friedkin (Dustin Milligan, Schitt’s Creek), and Estevez (Neil Brown Jr.,
Straight Out of Compton), and The Rowdy 3, who are actually four men,
which I won’t list because this is getting ridiculously long.
All of the above are zany main
characters, and their individual threads are all already coming into
conflict already in episode one. It’s an extremely convoluted plot that
is surprisingly easy to follow, and constantly entertaining. There was
not a moment of this pilot that I didn’t love, and while I have
absolutely no idea where this is going, or really, even who Dirk is, I
am eager to follow along.
If you like offbeat British humor in
general, or Douglas Adams in particular, I recommend checking out DIRK
GENTLY’S HOLISITC DETECTIVE AGENCY, premiering Saturday at 9/8 c on BBC
America.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.