The Acorn streamer – specializing in British-type mysteries – has a busy stretch of shows and news.
For now, it has three movie-length episodes of “The Chelsea Detective” (shown here in a previous season). After that are six episodes of the long-running “Brokenwood Mysteries.”
And further away? Acorn has signed Brooke Shields for a series that – in a break from Acorn tradition –will be set in the U.S. Read more…
Rippling through “Mrs. Sidhu Investigates” (shown here), the new streaming series, is the notion of “Indian aunties.”
These aren’t the family-tree aunts; you usually only get a few of those. They’re the it-takes-a-village type; Suk Pannu, the “Sidhu” creator, figures he had dozens.
“They gave us lots of love and lots of food,” he said. “They knew what we were up to, before we did.”
And, he figured, they could probably be great crimesolvers. So he created Mrs. Sidhu, a skilled caterer. That brings her in contact with the higher-ups, who seem to be murder-prone. Read more…
Defying the wise counsel of his career advisors, Adrian Scarborough became an actor – and a busy one.
He had subservient roles – the valet in “Blunt Talk,” butler in “Upstairs Downstairs,” chauffeur in “Don Juan in Soho.” He had bigger ones – Villanelle’s handler in “Killing Eve,” the iffy doctor in “Sanditon.” He played more doctors, plus vicars, a goblin, a bunny, a mole and Winston Churchill.
It’s been an enviable career, sort of. “You have these great character roles,”said Scarborough, 55, “but only for two or three days …. You parachute in, do a few scenes and don’t really get to meet people.”
Then came “The Chelsea Detective” (shown here). It’s a chance to dig into a person and place he finds fascinating. Read more…
The world has had plenty of reasons for actors to be unemployed. There’s Covid, halting Read more…
As our TV sets fill up with British crime-solvers, some traditions persist.
At home, these people are solemn and solitary. That has continued – with occasional exceptions – from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot, Inspector Morse and more.
And it’s true of Max Arnold in “The Chelsea Detective” series (shown here), on the Acorn streaming service. “I think he’s a born-again melancholic,” Adrian Scarborough, who plays him, told the Television Critics Association. “Putting him … in the middle of the Thames, on his little houseboat, was very deliberate.”
That’s part of an overload of crime tales from England and its former colonies: Read more…
Poets and policemen, at their best, are observers.
They parse their words, delay their judgments. For Adam Dalgleish – a poetry-writing police detective – it’s a long delay.
Now Dalgliesh (shown here) is back in our TV sets, with movies streaming on the first three Mondays of November. Read more…
American TV may savor the good-cop/bad-cop concept.
But in England – where crime shows flourish – there’s old-cop/young cop. Just ask Neil Dudgeon (shown here), whose “Midsomer Murders” is starting a four-movie stretch on the Acorn streaming service.
“I spent a lot of times as a younger actor, (paired with) a senior actor,” Dudgeon told the Television Critics Association. “And the senior actor would do all the thinking and be rather brilliant at solving a crime. And then he would say to me: ‘Oh, look, he’s run off into the river. Chase him!’” Read more…
