J.K. Rowling show is the tonic we need
This isn’t news, but the news from the U.S. is stressing everyone out.
“Should the Red Hen restaurant have kicked out Sarah Huckabee Sanders?”
“Does Laura Ingraham really think that all kids who cry on non-Fox news are child actors?”
“Why did CNN spell Corey Lewandowski’s sad-trombone sound womp-womp and not wah-wah?” These are the questions hijacking every conversation.
Stephen Colbert delivered a monologue on Monday night without a single joke. His tone was light, but his phrases were dead serious: “Humanitarian crisis on the southern border;” “stolen kids;” “Here’s another thing we should be surprised by;” “If you deny anyone due process, you deny everyone due process.”
He said, “The president is not freeing the children,” repeated it, then added, “For those who just emerged from a coma, you’re going to want to slip back in.”
So now is an excellent time to distract yourself with C.B. Strike, a just-smart-enough, just-soothing-enough British import airing on HBO Canada. (In the U.K., where it aired last year, it was called Strike.)
It’s based on the three detective novels J.K. Rowling wrote under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith: The Cuckoo’s Calling (three hour-long episodes), The Silkworm and Career of Evil (two episodes each).
Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) is a broody Afghanistan war veteran turned London private detective. With his last dime, he hires a perky new assistant, Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger). Together, they are crime solvers with chemistry.
It’s a cable hour, so there are severed limbs, sexual abuse and strip clubs. Strike is antihero-ish: he drinks too much, has no personal life and is bitter about losing a leg in combat. Robin is feminist-friendly: she loves her job fiercely, despite the protestations of her conventional fiancé, Matthew (Kerr Logan).
But the seven hours are pleasingly old-school, too: no gratuitous violence, a lot of character development and the crimes wrap up like tidy parcels. It’s Hercule Poirot for the new millennium, if Poirot lived above a seedy bar and sported stubble instead of a ’stache.
Rowling, who’s an executive producer on the series, created a pair of characters — the cynical sleuth and the bright sidekick who might save him — who are television staples for good reason (see also Bones, Castle, Moonlighting, etc.).
It’s an inherently romantic formula. The heroes are misfits who work in the shadows, whose jobs bring them into daily contact with the worst that human nature has to offer. Yet they continue to fight against that: to solve crimes, to fix relationships, to right wrongs. Their work takes them into intimate corners at odd times. And routinely, they’re put in peril so they have to save each other again and again.
Will Strike ever get over his glamorously painful childhood (his dad, a rock star, ignored him)?
Will Robin’s relationship with Matthew last? Most crucially-slash-typically, will their eyelocks, which linger longer with each episode, ever turn into romance?
We’ll have to wait for Rowling to write another book before we find out. I hope she hurries, because we need all the escapist rescuing we can get.