Acorn unearths buried comedic gem
For those who worry, with good reason, that too many foreign-made TV shows are imitative of American television, well, as the saying goes, there will always be an England.
And thank goodness for that, and for shows like “Detectorists,” a unique delight about two middle-aged guys who fancy themselves archaeologists and spend most of their day scanning a particular field with metal detectors.
That’s it. That’s the gist of the show, whose third season is available for streaming (along with the previous two) on Monday, Jan. 15, on Acorn TV.
Mackenzie Crook (“The Office”) and
Toby Jones (“The Girl”) are Andy Stone and Lance Stater, respectively. Andy has an actual job, working for the government on construction sites to ensure that no archaeological discoveries are destroyed in the process of excavation. Lance is divorced, rather fastidious about his life, dating Toni (Rebecca Callard), who lives on a houseboat on the river. Lance is temporarily hosting his daughter, Kate (Alexa Davies), which has disrupted his life, especially his personal life, because he cannot set foot on Toni’s boat: He gets seasick.
Andy and Lance are members of a group of hobbyist detectorists, who, as you would expect, are rather quirky. One publishes a book on buttons found in the area of Essex where the show is set. He knows it won’t wind up on the New York Times best-seller list, but as he says that, you know he secretly hopes it just might.
The entire show is about hope, about believing that there is good in people and maybe some good in the ground as well.
Still, Andy and Lance are constantly looking over their shoulders to ensure that their particular field isn’t being “invaded” by their archenemies, Philip and Paul (Simon Farnby and Paul Cesar, respectively), rogue metalists who keep changing the name of their partnership in a vain attempt to make it sound cool.
Andy and Lance’s real rival is of the avian persuasion, though, and has stolen something Lance has found in the field. The six episodes of the new season are all about, well, the pursuit of magpies.
And that pursuit could not be more charming, quirky, droll and absolutely lovable. The shared optimism evidenced in their shared obsession with detectoring infuses every episode. Life isn’t always kind or easy for them. One of the two loses a job, Toby is too nice to tell anyone they’ve overstayed their welcome, including his exwife Maggie (Lucy Benjamin) and his daughter, Andy personally stops traffic to save the life of a hedgehog ambling across a road.
All in all, this is a world worth living in, and, by the way, made all the more attractive by the presence of Diana Rigg as the mother of Andy’s girlfriend, Becky (Rachel Stirling, Rigg’s real-life daughter).
The series is written and directed by Crook, and beautifully so. He captures the characters perfectly, elicits superb performances from the entire cast and, in particular, has a brilliant way of weaving naturalistic, underplayed humor into every scene.
If you took a metal detector to “Detectorists,” you’d discover gold.