It Came from Interlibrary Loan: Jonathan Creek

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.

  • fish eye no miko

    Oh, this does sound like fun! I should see if my local video rental place has these.
    A few things:

    between quite chunky and downright fat–and the reason isn’t obscure, as a running gag has her constantly eating

    Wow, a fat person who constantly eating–that’s HYSTERICAL! [rolls eyes] Sadly, this kinda tempers who whole “she’s the object of the main character’s affections”. One stereotype (overweight women aren’t desirable) averted. another… apparently not so much.

    Like many Brit shows, a “season” of JC is but six episodes long

    Yeah, short episode seasons can work really well.
    On the one hand, more of a show you like is nice, and it works fine for “episodic” shows (shows where each episode is pretty much its own entity, with a beginning, middle, and end in each episode), but when a show has one central plot for a whole season… Personally, I’ve seen way too many US shows with episodes where you can just feel the show spinning its wheel every once in a while. A well-written show can occasionally do a character-based or a “filler” episode, but with a lot of shows, you can tell when they’re just stretching things out to kill time before the finale…

  • Toby Clark

    The second series is my favourite as well, with every episode standing out in some way. The Scented Room would be my pick for best episode, followed by Danse Macabre.

  • Rock Baker

    I can’t really get behind the six-episodes-per-season format, and for one simple reason: Black Books. A friend introduced myself and my folks to Black Books and it acted like a comical narcotic! I got hooked, my folks got hooked, my brother got hooked, his friends got hooked, his friends’ families got hooked, it spread like plague! But in the three seasons Black Books was on the air there were only 18 episodes. Now, most everyone I know is thirsty for more episodes and there are none! You always want to see more episodes of your favorite shows, and it seems sort of cruel to introduce something to people they love but only give them a pinch when they want (indeed, crave in the most basic way) a tablespoon.

  • Ah, yes, the Fawlty Towers Rule.

  • Aussiesmurf

    British shows that left me thirsty for more : fawlty towers, north square, this life, ultraviolet (still the best treatment of vampires I’ve ever seen) and I Claudius
    say

  • JazzyJ

    Aussie: Hate to sound like a hick from the stix, but…

    I have only ever been aware of the big-budget, Hollywood version of Ultraviolet. I assumed that it was based off of a comic or some such. Have you seen the big one and can compare? (I assume a small BBC version to be FAR superior to the Hollywood…)

    Thanks!

  • BeckoningChasm

    Sounds like a good show, and as for the classic whodunit stuff, remember there’s Monk. Of course, some of this plots were absolutely impossible to figure out (for a normal human).

  • R. Dittmar

    Damn your eyes, Ken Begg!! I’ve not heard of this show until just this morning. I went over to check a freebie episode out on Youtube and now I’m hooked! It was extremely clever and convinced me to go out and buy the 1st season for myself. Right now it looks like they’re selling all four seasons of the show over at Amazon for less than $20 a pop, so it’s definitely worth taking a chance and getting some episodes for yourself.

  • I only heard of the program myself because the show’s creator wrote an introduction to a short story collection about, yes, locked room murders and impossible crimes. I had never heard of Jonathan Creek prior to that, and now can only wait for the final set to come out, dreading the fact at the same time that that will be the final six shows (minus the movies, which hopefully will get here at some point).

  • Bruce William Probst

    Um … Adam Krause is played by Stuart Milligan, not Spike Milligan! Apart from being, sadly, very dead, the idea of Spike playing a Lothario is kind of mind-boggling ….

    Maddy kind of grows on you as a character. Creek is not “pursuing” her, really, more of a “I might be interested if she is” kind of thing. Maddy is more obviously pursuing Creek but in a “I’ll play so hard-to-get he won’t get me” kind of way. It all comes to an amusing culmination in Season 3 (I think).

    Maddy is played by Caroline Quentin, who is quite a “name” actress in the UK (with a sit-com background, mostly). Davies is/was a stand-up comic.

    The show is very enjoyable, but sadly as it goes on the mysteries become increasingly difficult to believe.

    JazzyJ: the movie Ultraviolet shares nothing, other than its title and its subject matter (vampires) with the UK mini-series. I have no idea what inspired the movie, but the the TV show was an original creation (so far as I’m aware) and was absolutely brilliant. Run, do not walk, to your local source of DVDs and watch it. You will not be disappointed.

  • Thanks for the correction. I hadn’t gotten to the part of the third season yet (at that point) where they officially decided they weren’t going to be a couple–more or less. It’s ironic, then, that it was at this point when things finally got (mostly) settled between them that Maddy left the show.

    I’ll agree the mysteries get increasingly baroque, but that is the nature of the impossible crime/locked-room mystery genre. I quite enjoyed the third season, but the second season (aside from the first episode, when I figured out what was going on and thought the solution was way too easy) was gangbusters.

  • R. Dittmar

    I think the best thing about the locked room/impossible crime conceit is that it hasn’t been ruined by the genius of Agatha Christie like the basic whodunit. After you’ve read a lot of Christie, it’s nearly impossible to be fooled by whodunits anymore as all of the best tricks of the genre were essentially invented by her. To a great extent, all whodunits are really footnotes to one of her classic plots.

    Christie wasn’t big on the locked room plot, however, so there’s still a lot of experimentation to be done. I’d argue the best TV mysteries series have actively avoided the whodunit style altogether to stay out of the shadow of the master (mistress?). Columbo of course immortalized the inverted mystery and remained fresh year after year. Monk stayed fresh by used the whydunit as their bread and butter. Think about how many plotlines revolved around a seemingly ridiculous crime like murdering someone for a cherry pie. The whydunit was another literary style that Christie avoided for the most part.