If the premise of Lynley, a new BritBox series, sounds familiar to fans of British mystery series, it’s because Elizabeth George’s novels were adapted for a 2001-08 BBC series called The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. So this is Lynley for a new generation, but the class issues of the partnership between DI Thomas Lynley and DS Barbara Havers are still there.
Opening Shot: A boat motors towards a small island. A bird watcher gets out, and he almost immediately spies something on the rocks. He goes over and sees that it’s a body.
The Gist: DS Barbara Havers (Sofia Barclay) is in the office of DCI Brian Nies (Daniel Mays), having had a falling out with yet another DI partner. Nies tells her that he’s got a new inspector coming in; he’s going to partner her up with him, but it’s going to be her last chance before she’s out of a job.
That inspector is DI Thomas Lynley (Leo Suter, who you’ll likely recognize from Sanditon), looking movie-star handsome in a nicely-tailored jacket. He drives a vintage sports car, went to Oxford and worked for the Metropolitan Police in London before he took this job in costal Norfolk. Havers, on the other hand, is from Norfolk, and jokes that his parents were big in iron and steel: “My mother irons and my father steals.”
As they investigate the death of Guy Brouard, who owned the biggest estate on the island, the differences in their upbringings come out. Lynley is cautious, never goes with his gut, and doesn’t pull the trigger on an arrest until he feels there’s enough evidence. Havers, though, comes right out and asks a archaeology student named Sophie (Nadia Parkes) if she does reenactments when a witness said Brouard was seen with a young woman doing a reenactment on the night he died.
The two have conflicts all along the way, especially when Lynley refuses to make the Cambridge-educated Sophie a suspect, even after a dress with blood on it was found in her quarters and she lied about how the blood got there. But the class differences on the island become even more apparent when a video is revealed that shows Brouard having sex with Carmel (Gillian Saker), the wife of his son Adrian (Mark Field).
It also turns out that Nies has it out for Lynley; he was Lynley’s boss at the Met Police, and he uses Havers to feed him information on how Lynley is doing. For his own part, Lynley is getting snickers from fellow inspectors, who have all partnered with the difficult Havers.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Written by Steve Thompson and based on Elizabeth George’s novel series, this isn’t the first Lynley series; there was The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which ran between 2001 and 2008. This is also in the same 90-minute self-contained story format of Sherlock and other British mystery series.
Our Take: The mystery in the first episode of Lynley was perfectly serviceable; Brouard was a lascivious type who threatened and shagged younger women while his dying wife was being drugged by an estate worker, while he left a significant amount of money to the niece of his house manager while cutting his son out. But the real attraction of this show is going to be the class differences between Lynley and Havers, how those come up during investigations, and how they use those differences to solve murders.
To that end, Suter and Barclay work well together. In the moments where she probes him about why he’s in Norfolk, there is definitely a spark there that hints at future bonding between the two very different detectives. Their clashing investigative styles should end up complementing each other at some point, even if they argue about it during various episodes.
We definitely see hints of each of their backstories; Lynley’s existence seems to be solitary and distant from his parents, whereas Havers lives with her mother and father; we find out during the episode that Havers lost her brother when he was young. The 90-minute episode length should give Thompson room to explore their backstories while they solve the mystery at hand. Given the fact that the mysteries themselves are reasonably twisty but not hard to try to solve along with the detectives, the pairing of Suter and Barclay should make for a very watchable series.
Sex and Skin: Some clumsy-looking sex on the tape of Brouard with his daughter-in-law, but it’s pretty tame.
Parting Shot: After solving the murder, Lynley says of Brouard that no one stood in his way. “Life is supposed to be a battle,” he tells Havers. Havers replies, “Is that your way of telling me I’m still on the team?”
Sleeper Star: Daniel Mays is perfectly slimy as DCI Nies, and we know that he’s going to factor into some of the stories more than he did in the first mystery.
Most Pilot-y Line: We wonder how much of being difficult is because the male DIs didn’t want a female DS challenging them? It goes unsaid in the first episode, but it feels like her rep might have a bit of misogyny behind it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Lynely will succeed if it mines the differences between Lynley and Havers and leans on the chemistry between Suter and Barclay.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.