“Annika”: The detective would like to have a word with you
A detective whose unit investigates waterborne crimes walks onto a bridge, looks into the camera and says, “Call me Annika.” She then proceeds to chat with the audience about Ahab and his white whale while she watches a murder victim being pulled from the River Clyde.
That was our introduction to the British crime drama “Annika,” and through two seasons (the second premiered Oct. 15 as part of PBS’ “Masterpiece”) the hero has continued to talk to the audience: agonizing over her complicated relationships, thinking through her cases, delivering deadpan ripostes unheard by the other characters on- screen. And in each episode she invokes a literary work — “Twelfth Night,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” a Scottish ballad about a kidnapped child — that ties into that week’s story in subtle or, somewhat more often, obvious ways.
That might sound like a double deal- breaker, and I clicked away from “Annika” the first time I heard the words “Moby- Dick.” But I knew I would return to it, because Annika Strandhed, the Norwegianborn, Glasgow, Scotlandbased cop, is played by Nicola Walker — an actress whose ubiquity on British television is entirely justified by the wry, layered humanity she brings to all her characters. Walker’s ability to flesh out the emotions lurking beneath selfconsciousness and awkwardness makes the firstperson conceit of “Annika” not just tolerable but apt and engaging.
The prominence of her voice in the series also flows naturally from the show’s source, “Annika Stranded,” a BBC drama podcast about an Oslo homicide detective that was a solo showcase for Walker. ( Both shows were created by Nick Walker, who is no relation to Nicola Walker, if you can believe it.) The television show supplies Annika, who relocates to Glasgow to lead a fictional outfit called the Marine Homicide Unit, with a three-person investigative team, a lonely but goodhumored teenage daughter and a sometime love interest, who happens to be the daughter’s therapist.
That’s a standard complement for a series of this type, and aside from the protagonist’s fourth-wallbreaking, “Annika” is a typical British cop show, in the categories of regional and seriocomic. It boasts lovely Scottish scenery, with side trips to places like Edinburgh and the Hebrides, and spends a lot of its time on or near the water. It’s a dead- body- of- the-week show with a sense of humor that is perched comfortably between dark and twee; it could be a more literate, more serious cousin of “Midsomer Murders” or “Monk.”
The homicide cases mostly have the eccentric origins that this subgenre calls for — a tech billionaire drowned in his basement aquarium; a body pulled out of the North Sea encased in a block of ice — and their solutions can seem almost beside the point, an impression that grows stronger in the new season. The forensics sessions and computer searches and sudden flashes of deduction have a cookie- cutter familiarity; the most invigorating aspect of the police work is the show’s fetish for slapstick foot chases, which commence about twice an episode.
A lit tle perfunctoriness in the mysteries can be excused, though, given the overall pleasure to be had from Walker’s performance. Annika tends to her team more or less ably, but her work suffers from the strain she puts on herself by making a hash of her personal life. She is buoyant and funloving beneath a heavy mantle of fierce Nordic repression, and Walker’s mastery of stumbles, stammers and brief, piercing embarrassment keeps us on the character’s side.
Walker has a natural genius for establishing rapport with an audience, demonstrated in domestic melodramas like “The Split” and “Last Tango in Halifax” and in a succession of crime dramas. The best of those was the wonderful cold- case series “Unforgotten,” which she led for four seasons until her character was killed off in an arbitrary and dramatically unsatisfying fashion. “Unforgotten” returned for a fifth season last month (also on “Masterpiece”) with a new detective played by Sinead Keenan, and it was still very good — taken as a whole, it’s superior in writing ( by Chris Lang) and direction ( by Andy Wilson) to “Annika.” But without Walker, it doesn’t speak to us in quite the same way.