Criminology 102

Felt I didn't really finish with my thoughts on the subject in my last post, so here's some more.

Since crime is a commonly accepted fact of life, it's fairly safe to assume that it will have happened to the majority of people, that at some point in our lives, we're going to have to have dealt with the ramifications and repercussions of crime. The one thing that always strikes me is that we tend to blow crime way out of proportion on the screen. I mean, look at the cold-hearted killers that we get on the screen, take Cameron Pell from LUTHER as an example. I'll talk more fully about LUTHER next time.

He wanted to make London remember its myths and dark secrets, while brutally murdering people in a Mr. Punch mask. That's all well and good, it makes for compelling television, but at the same time, is there much of that in real life? The vast majority of crime is committed as Crime Of Passion, it simply comes out of the moment before we know what we're doing. I think the best series to highlight this is ACCUSED in recent years, if one can tolerate it's over ponderous and preaching nature.

So does that make the majority of criminal drama as fanciful as science-fiction and fantasy? Since this stuff doesn't really happen in 'real life', should we just accept it as fiction in the same way as we do MERLIN or STAR TREK? Or is it that it's grounded in reality and then takes off from there? The cops and robbers are still present in our everyday lives, but just not in such a way that we see on screen. Is there serious crime out there? Of course, but not enough of it for an episode a week.

Maybe that's why The Bill ended?

CASE HISTORIES.

You know, I really did quite like this show. The characters are easy to get on with, the writing's pretty well rounded and the style is very friendly to it's audiance. The whole two-part story lines are a common thing for the BBC, what with one of their producers having discovered a long time ago that a novel can be neatly divided in half and made into a TV serial and it certainly works in this instance.

It's always good to see Jason Isaacs get work, he's got to be one of my favourite actors over the years. His range lends itself well to this particular role, a gruff Yorkshire-born Private Detective working in Edinburgh, who's often carting his daughter around with him on his investigations. He's charismatic and ignorant at the same time and he seems to gather lost girls to him like a lighthouse gathers lost fishing ships.

All in all, I think my only real complaint with this series is probably drawn directly from the books themselves. Why are all the secondary cases he investigates somehow tied into the main one? He looks into the murder of a girl, a homeless girl then attaches herself to the father of this murdered girl, who just so happens to be the daughter of another woman who had hired Brody to go find her daughter? It's all a little convoluted and why do they all have to be linked? Surely the world's a big enough place for people to not have any connections to each other? Surely the story's big enough for that as well?

With six episodes under it's belt, which constitutes three out of the four current Jackson Brody novels, it's unceartain whether or not there'll be anymore Case Histories in the future, seeing as how they'll be out of source material. It's definately one I'd be interested in getting on DVD.

Next time, the one, the only, LUTHER.