As I’ve long bemoaned (see my now quite old review of A Stranger Among Us), the classic whodunnit is largely extinct in modern movies and TV shows. To be blunt, audiences today seem to have little interest in, or even awareness of, the idea of being apprised in a fair play fashion of a series of clues and striving to figure out the culprit before the detective (police, private of amateur) announces the solution. The last TV shows to go completely old school in this regard, Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis: Murder, a) catered to an older demographic who still remembered this genre, and b) made the clues extremely obvious so that the audience could figure things out without undue strain on the gray cells.
However, Britain still allows for the tradition, and I was happy to come across the show Jonathan Creek. This not only features whodunnit murders, but even better, is built around the seemingly Impossible / Locked Room murder. This show will be a treat particularly for fans of the old George Peppard show Banacek, which featured seemingly impossible robberies.
The ‘detective’ in this show is the titular Creek, who wittily is a mildly maladjusted eccentric who designs the acts for flamboyant cockhound magician Adam Kraus. As such, he is uniquely qualified to figure out the often ludicrously complicated machinations behind these (generally) murders. As such, you can argue the show is a howdunnit more than a whodunnit.
As Creek at one point notes, in fact, this is the advantage of this sort of crime: There’s a built in inhibition to believe that anyone would go to such elaborate lengths to commit a crime. In other words, people subconsciously apply Occam’s Razor and instinctively kind of throw their hands up when confronted with the impossible. Creek, in contrast, never loses sight of Holmes’ classic dictum; “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbably, must be the truth.” For Creek these crimes are (as they are for the viewer) primarily an intellectual exercise. He wants to figure out how they do it.
Creek is matched (at least for the first three seasons) with reporter / romantic foil / comic relief Maddy Magellan. Maddy frankly strikes me as a quite obnoxious character, and ultimately an unsympathetic one, although I guess she’s meant to be ‘spunky’ and ‘quirky.’ Maddy generally demands a lot more deference than she deserves or gives others, and that sort of character generally rubs me the wrong way.
The weirdest thing about her, though, is that she straddles that borderline between quite chunky and downright fat–and the reason isn’t obscure, as a running gag has her constantly eating. Even so, it’s a mark of how conditioned we are by Hollywood that it seems truly strange to watch the exceedingly average-looking Creek haplessly pursue Maddy, who one can’t imagine being the romantic interest female lead of an American show.
Creek is very well played by Alan Davies, and happily is a bit introverted without being forced to be downright QUIRKY. He’s quiet and unobtrusive, mostly, which right there separates him from the vast majority of American TV characters. In any case, Davies does the dreamy intellectual thing quite well.
Adam Kraus is played in the first show of the first season by none other than a young Anthony Head. He left to do Buffy in the States, however, and Kraus disappeared for the rest of the season. He came back in the second in the guise of Spike Stuart Milligan, who is less outrageous in the part, and somewhat less fun, at least to me.
The mysteries are pretty good. Like many Brit shows, a ‘season’ of JC is but six episodes long, allowing for them to focus on writing solid impossible crimes in a way that would be all but impossible if they were writing 24 of them in one year. I particularly liked the second season, where they got away from impossible murders for a few episodes in favor of mixing things up a bit. One heist plot indeed recalls Banacek.
I’ve only figured out one of them, and frankly was disappointed at how obvious that one was. A couple of others struck me as taking things a bit too far even for this genre, but on the whole, the solutions are pleasingly elaborate and generally we do get all the clues presented to us fairly.
The four and sadly final season of the show, from 2003 and sans Maddy, is out here in January. However, Creek returned in a one-shot movie earlier this year. Another has been shot for showing in 2010. Hopefully those will be made available here at some point.
Trivia note: The show’s very first episode features a barely recognizable Colin Baker, while the first season of the second features a barely changed Peter Davison. I was hoping this was intentional, and that the first episode of the third season would co-star another Doctor Who, but sadly it wasn’t so.
Meanwhile, Hugh Laurie was at one point in the running for the role, and apparently was quite interested in it. He would have been great, but I’m sure he’s happy enough playing a medical detective in House M.D.
Fun stuff.
