Let's go to the adjective store to describe Luther, a British police show premiering Sunday at 9 p.m.
Powerful, challenging, ambiguous, surprising, dark, odd, stunning, grisly, disturbing, raw, sexy, taut, intense, captivating. One critic called it "creepy." Another adjective comes to mind to describe the programmers at BBC America, which will be telecasting Luther: stupid. There are so many places to schedule a series, and they chose Sundays between 9 and 10:30 p.m.
This show is sure to appeal to Masterpiece: Mystery! fans, who have been wallowing in psychologically complex police thrillers for years.Luther has a lot in common with the current Mystery! occupant, "Wallander." Focusing on a gifted misfit in the London police department, Luther is even closer in feel to the Helen Mirren series,Prime Suspect, though perhaps a half-step below in quality, which is in no way a knock.
Luther is one of the most schizophrenic drama series in recent years. The first three episodes offer standard psycho-of-the-week plots, in which an off-the-rails policeman, John Luther (Idris Elba), simultaneously dazzles his colleagues with his genius and terrifies them with his impetuosity. In response, his boss, Detective Superintendent Rose Teller (an underused Saskia Reeves wielding a wobbly Cockney accent), calls Luther’s presence on her team “nitroglycerin.”
But this formula gives way in the last three episodes to riveting drama. These start with the horrifying disintegration of a lower-middle-class working man into the madness of serial murder and end with a tangle of corruption and killing that recalls the stomach-churning violence of classic crime movies of the ‘70s.
Some of the initial problems with the series stem from Elba’s own overwrought performance. But more arise from weak plotting and Luther’s excessive psychological baggage. Ironically, the drama kicks into creative overdrive only when he is no longer the show’s sole focus. Although Elba captures the moody slouch of the disaffected Londoner—shoulders hunched, hands jammed in his trouser pockets—he pitches his performance too intensely from the beginning. When a simple obstacle precipitates Luther’s loss of control, he has nowhere to go when facing a more fundamental shock, whether an abduction scene decorated in screeds of nonsense written in blood or his estranged wife’s rejection of his reconciliation attempts.
Creator/writer Neil Cross includes the recent cliche of the selective psychopath, Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), as Luther’s new best friend, and an irritatingly passive-aggressive romantic rival, Mark North (Paul McCann). In some scenes, the desperation on Elba’s face seems as much a response to his reading of the script as to the repeatedly noted burdens of Luther’s job. The show includes other clichés as well, including Luther’s inspiring his fellow cops to talk up his imagination and daring, even as his crime-solving seems pedestrian. In the first episode, which premiered on BBC America 17 October, Luther’s soi-disant brilliant revelation of a murderer’s secreting the lethal gun in the stomach of a dead dog was semaphored right from his earliest observations at the crime scene. And in Episode Three, his supposedly ingenious ruse to trap killer Lucien Burgess (Paul Rhys) seems more like the fitting up that once marred the Metropolitan Police’s reputation for probity.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=So5O6yeoPys
collider.com/idris-elba-ruth-wilson-interview-luther/
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