Even detectives deserve a little shot of happiness
True Detective: Night Country
Sky Atlantic, Monday/ streaming on Sky and NOW TV
Dancing On Ice
UTV and Virgin Media One, Sunday
Reacher Prime Video, streaming
Who remembers the great television detectives of the Seventies and Eighties? I’m thinking of Kojak, Frank Cannon, Eddie Shoestring, Jim Rockford, Jessica Fletcher, and so on. If you cast your mind back, I bet you wouldn’t remember much about their family or private lives (with the exception of Fletcher, who had more cousins than a child born into a Mughal harem).
Then along came Scandi noir, in Wallander, The Bridge, The Killing, and so on, and every detective had to have a messy private life. Divorce, angry kids, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, all became staples of the genre. When it worked, it was magnificent, in the likes of Mare Of Easttown with Kate Winslet, whose personal turmoil was as much part of the story as the case of murdered and missing young women she was investigating.
The problem now is that it seems no detective is allowed to be happy. None of them go home to a warm and welcoming family unit, just more angst. So it proved in the first episode of the latest series in the True Detective franchise, this one subtitled Night Country.
It literally is the darkest one yet, because it is set in Ennis, a small town in Alaska (played here by Iceland), where night falls in December and day doesn’t break again for two months.
It opened in a research station, where eight scientists were studying ice cores to try to unravel the mystery of how life on Earth began and, almost immediately, it got very silly indeed.
One of the men trembled, before enigmatically muttering: ‘She’s here’, and next thing we knew, all eight had disappeared, leaving behind a message on a whiteboard that read: ‘We are all dead’ and a severed tongue. Enter police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster, brilliant as always) and state trooper Evangeline Navarro (the equally excellent Kali Reis), who have beef over the former’s failed investigation of the murder of Anne Kowtok, a native Inupiat woman, six years earlier and likely the owner of the aforementioned tongue.
Danvers lives with her adopted daughter, who has made a sex tape with an underage girl, while Navarro is trying to get help for a younger sister with mental health issues. On the fringe of the town, Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw in a massive parka) is visited by a dead relative, who leads her to three of the bodies, frozen in terror.
True Detective has flirted before with the supernatural, but all this made me long for was the super normal, just a detective doing her job, going home to a hot meal cooked by a loving partner and putting her feet up to watch telly.
I am sufficiently intrigued to stick with it, though, and I hope the police procedural aspect now takes over from the sturm und drang at home and I also hope that many of the peripheral characters come to the fore. Oh, and if you ever want to ruin someone’s day, take a tip from Foster and pour a bottle of Baileys into their petrol tank.
Now, from the frozen wastes of Alaska to an ice rink in England, as Dancing On Ice kicked off on Sunday night. Stephen Mulhern is the new co-host with Holly Willoughby following Phillip Schofield’s fall from grace last year, and he’s an entertaining addition to the show. The usual clutch of Z-list celebrities are involved, many of them on repeat reality TV duty.
Amber Davies won Love Island, athlete Greg Rutherford previously was on Strictly, Coronation Street’s Ryan Thomas won Celebrity Big Brother and Miles Nazaire has been on Made In Chelsea and Celebrity Ex On The Beach. There are others
I’ve never heard of, which is par for the course for this show.
I did, however, get a good giggle out of boxer Ricky Hatton, who was truly awful, and an actual belly laugh when he punched Mulhern on the arm and flattened him. Given the dearth of innovation in reality TV, though, I suspect it won’t be too long before we get Boxing On Ice.
The final episode of the second series of Prime Video’s top-rated show, Reacher, based on the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child, dropped on Friday and it was spectacular. There must be an entire psychology thesis in why, despite loathing the concept of vigilante justice in real life, I loved every moment of revenge for the murders of Reacher’s former army buddies.
It was inevitable that the bad guy, Shane Langston (Robert Patrick, who played the evil terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day over 30 years ago), would meet his end in the same way he had killed one of Reacher’s friends and I cheered loudly when it happened.
Reacher and his team are borderline psychotic and their brutal execution of a shadowy arms dealer reminded me why I would cross the street to avoid all of them in the real world. On television, though, there was something brilliantly visceral about these violent avengers and something quite touching about how they distributed $65m they seized at the end.
The third series is already filming and I can’t wait to see where Jack Reacher fetches up next, ungainly gait and all. At least he never has to go home to a grumbling wife and snotty kids, before taking comfort in a bottle.