An Endeavour to remember
Prequels are hard to pull off, especially when the original is as respected, enduring and beloved as the 1987-2000 U.K. detective drama Inspector Morse was.
Hardly anyone who admired the late John Thaw as the Thames Valley detective with an eye for emotional detail and a taste for the finer things in life could picture anyone else in the role.
And yet, as the four-part prequel Endeavour concludes this weekend with the episode Home, Shaun Evans, a 33-year-old Liverpool native with a handful of TV credits has done exactly that.
Morse was an unusual hero for TV. He could be distant, moody and abrupt to the point of rudeness. Thaw didn’t so much play the part as seep into his skin. He was the thinking woman’s action hero, but not an easy man to like.
Evans had the unenviable task of showing how Morse turned into the man he was when viewers first saw him.
And yet, as anyone who has watched Endeavour these past few weeks knows, with its tales of dashed dreams and silenced hopes, it’s as if Morse is being played by Thaw as a younger version of himself.
Endeavour, more so than Inspector Morse, is about the clash of cultures and changing attitudes in the 1960s period in which the stories are set.
Some things never change, though. Human nature, for one. Academia and politics, for another. Sunday’s season finale finds Morse, a relatively untested detective constable, investigating the hit-and-run death of a pre-eminent Oxford professor while studying for his sergeant’s exam.
Endeavour is a mystery series, and an engaging one at that. Remarkably, though, it has not only realized the promise of the original, but in some ways improved on it. Morse could be thoroughly off-putting, but now fans know why.
(Sunday, PBS 9 p.m.)
Jane Campion’s gloomy and strangely alluring BBC Two miniseries Top of the Lake was nominated for a movieEmmy last week, opposite more likely Emmy candidates Behind the Candelabra, American Horror Story and The Bible, among others.
Top of the Lake might win, though. And if it does, it will be one more small victory for quality over popularity.
Lake stars Elisabeth Moss as Det. Robin Griffin, a moody, relatively green detective investigating the disappearance of a 12-yearold girl who earlier tried to drown herself in a pristine New Zealand lake and was later found to be five months pregnant. At every turn, Det. Griffin is met with condescension, doubt and outright hostility, mostly from her primarily male colleagues and superiors but also from some of her female friends and acquaintances she counts on to support her.
That sounds like a tired TV trope — Helen Mirren practically wrote the book on tough, female detectives making do in a man’s world, in the original Prime Suspect, but there’s so much about Lake that distinguishes it from the deceptively tranquil rural setting, that it looks, sounds and feels like nothing else on TV.
Top of the Lake was screened in its seven-hour entirety at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and recently ended on the U.S. Sundance Channel.
It’s only now appearing in Canada, on Bravo and is definitely worth a look.
(Saturday, Bravo, 9 p.m.)