The police procedural remains one of the most reliable and prolific television genres since the 1950s when Dragnet ruled the airwaves and the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sgt. Joe Friday — the show’s preternaturally stern lead character — busted episode after episode of heinous fictional criminals. After decades of programs about law and order (including the Law & Order franchise in its many incarnations), the format has gone through a number of tweaks, the most prominent one these days being quirky, sometimes damaged, but gifted people as the central crime-solvers.
These unlikely crusaders for justice hearken back to author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s uncanny Victorian sleuth Sherlock Holmes whose adventures have spawned an unending parade of public-domain-enabled versions of the man and his supporting cast — two of the latest being on broadcast TV: Watson, a CBS series about the investigator’s now-solo sidekick Dr. Watson in modern-day Pittsburgh, Penn. (seriously), and The CW’s Sherlock & Daughter, about an older incarnation of Holmes living in late 19th-century London and discovering that he may have fathered a bastard American offspring.
Sherlock’s TV progeny includes Lieutenant Columbo (Peter Falk), that laconic, but astute cop on the long-running NBC series Columbo; novelist Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury), the frumpy, observant cross between Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew on CBS’s Murder, She Wrote; and Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub), the amusing, obsessive-compulsive, and infuriatingly accurate police consultant on USA Network’s Monk. Monk was frequently touted in the channel’s promotional materials as “The Defective Detective” — a title that could also be applied to the leads in other recent series.
There’s a defective quality to the antihero of Fox/Netflix’s Lucifer — a suave, yet conflicted version of the devil himself whose supernatural abilities help a Los Angeles policewoman capture and convict killers. The investigative true-crime podcast launched by a bickering trio of oddball Manhattanites in Only Murders in the Building, soon heading into its fifth season on Hulu, invariably puts them in the line of fire. The title character in Elsbeth, which just wrapped its second season on CBS, is an eccentric lawyer who assists the NYPD in uncovering the sins of the wealthy and powerful. Three more similarly off-kilter detectives headline their current, highly addictive shows that blend a murder-of-the-week set-up with comedic elements while an overarching mystery keeps you tuning in for more revelations.
‘Ludwig’
Although circumstantially different from Monk, London resident John Taylor, the central figure in the wry six-episode British miniseries Ludwig, is also a socially awkward person. Taylor (David Mitchell), who is a brilliant professional designer of popular puzzle books under the nom de plume “Ludwig,” suffers agoraphobia, which is so pronounced that his sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) has to force him to leave his flat and come to her aid in Cambridge, where his twin brother, James — her husband and a DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) with the local police force — has gone missing. Consequently, Lucy convinces the cripplingly nervous John to impersonate James to gain access to police headquarters and try to figure out the absent twin’s whereabouts. This puts John in the unlikely position of having to do James’ job for a time, and with his analytical, puzzle-sharpened mind, the otherwise meek John turns out to be pretty good at it.
Ludwig, created and written by Mark Brotherhood, works as well as it does in large part due to its casting of U.K. comedy icon David Mitchell as both John and James. Mitchell is one half of the writing-and-performing duo Mitchell & Webb, alongside his fellow Cambridge Footlights sketch troupe alumnus Robert Webb. Having done several television shows and films as a team and on their own, they’re probably best known for playing contentious roommates Mark and Jeremy on Peep Show — an innovative and truly uproarious British sitcom that ran on Channel 4 in England from 2003 to 2015, featured some of the earliest TV appearances by eventual Oscar-winner Olivia Colman, and was cocreated by Jesse Armstrong (Succession) with Sam Bain, Mitchell, and Webb. Now, Mitchell may have found a solo project that will bring him a new level of acclaim, even if his fussy, frazzled John Taylor isn’t so far removed from his hapless Peep Show persona. Ending on somewhat of a cliffhanger, Ludwig has already been renewed for a sophomore run of episodes.
Ludwig is available for streaming on BritBox.
‘Poker Face’
Natasha Lyonne is back for the second season of Poker Face as Charlie Cale — the wisecracking, scruffy, psychic, female 21st-century equivalent to Columbo, complete with weekly standalone mysteries that begin by depicting the crime and wrap with Charlie using her internal lie detector to nail the miscreant behind the murderous misdeeds. The brainchild of director-writer Rian Johnson (the Knives Out movies), Poker Face is a mystery box of thrills and chuckles as Charlie travels from town to town, comes upon an untimely death, flexes her snark, and drops truth bombs on the flummoxed suspects. Initially, our sardonic heroine was crisscrossing the country with bad guys on her tail to eliminate her due to a Season One transgression in Las Vegas, and an object in motion has remained in motion for the new season. One of the great joys of Poker Face is its parade of renowned actors as suspects. Last season’s guests included Adrien Brody, Benjamin Bratt, Ellen Barkin, Katie Holmes, Chloe Sevigny, Ron Perlman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lil Rel Howery, and Hong Chau. The first episode of Season Two features the acclaimed Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) in a tour de force multicharacter performance that complicates Charlie’s usual efficiency as an unofficial private eye.
Poker Face is currently available for streaming on Peacock.
‘High Potential’
Closely adapted by showrunner Drew Goddard from the mega-popular French series HPI: Haut Potentiel Intellectuel, ABC’s High Potential stars Kaitlin Olson as Morgan, a cleaning woman for the LAPD whose high I.Q. and compulsive need to analyze things leads to her solving a murder for the detectives at the police station where she works. That results in her getting a gig with the cops as a consultant, much to the chagrin of an old-school detective who is partnered with her. Morgan is prone to short skirts, tight tops, and sexy boots, she’s a caring mother of three whose first husband disappeared and whose second mate is still in her life as the father of her youngest two kids, despite not living together. (Let’s just say that the woman is a handful.) There’s an ongoing question of what happened to Morgan’s first husband, but this is essentially another weekly procedural with an idiosyncratic idiot-savant at its heart — like Monk or Poker Face. Olsen, whose way with a gag is a regular asset on the FX sitcom It’s Always Funny in Philadelphia, is captivating as Morgan. For the record, she’s matched in every way by France’s Audrey Fleurot as winsome loose cannon Morgane, Morgan’s French template, on HPI: Haut Potentiel Intellectuel, which has already run for four seasons and can be watched with subtitles or a dubbed English audio track on Hulu. Meanwhile, High Potential was a hit in its first set of 13 episodes with more assured to come in the fall.
High Potential is broadcast on ABC and, along with HPI, is also available for streaming on Hulu.
