A professor investigates
It may be little known in SA but the original Belgian series Professor T was a firm favourite in the UK, where it aired for three seasons from 2015 to 2018. It focuses on an eccentric university criminology professor who’s enlisted by a former student-turned-police-inspector to consult on cases for the police using his formidable book-smarts to solve real-world cases. The show went on to be adapted for successful German and French audiences.
Now it’s received its first English treatment as a solidly entertaining and satisfyingly quirky take on the traditional police procedural starring Ben Miller as Cambridge criminology professor Jasper Tempest and Emma Naomi as Lisa Donckers, his former student, now a police officer.
Each of the first season’s six episodes focuses on a new case requiring Professor T’s singular skill set. But there’s a back story of past trauma and familial tension that offers an overarching personal mystery for audiences. Miller and Naomi, who recently worked together on the Netflix smash-hit period
series Bridgerton, have an easy chemistry that make them an engagingly odd couple.
Tempest’s OCD and stiff social ineptitude are offset by a device that allows the audience into his rich and often very funny imagination, brought to life in a series of kooky fantasy sequences. He’s given plenty of further aggravation by his zany, bohemian, mother Adelaide (Frances de la Tour). It’s all very Sherlock Holmes with a light, mostly family-friendly touch, but it manages to pack enough originality into its characters to keep you watching. It’s also helped by lush photography and the beauty of its Cambridge setting.
It may share some surface similarities with an older popular series about another English university town detective but Professor T is decidedly more chipper and optimistic than Inspector Morse. Where Morse was a detective investigating the darker side of the lives of academics and students in Oxford, Tempest is comfortable in his ivory tower until he’s coaxed out and forced to come face to face with the gritty realities of his subject.
It’s not exactly breaking the mould of the British police procedural but it mostly manages to be interesting, well-acted and socially aware enough to make it a better than usual entry into the field.
‘Professor T’ is available on BritBox. To find out more and sign up go to britbox.com