User Reviews

I recently watched the Roy Marsden series and this is nowhere near as good. Each story is rushed, crammed into two episodes. The pointless sidekick is horrendous, terrible attitude, insubordinate and overacts. He irritated me no end and so did Dalgliesh's curious failure to discipline him. In "A taste for death" the RM episode, the murdered man's widow is carrying her husband's child and heir. He is aware of her infidelity and changes his Will leaving the bulk of his estate in trust for his son. In this version the baby is the lovers quite an important change to the plot, why?

I find Bertie Carvel the ideal actor to take up the role of Dalgliesh, and think he portrays the character quite well. What a pity, then, that the scripts are so appalling. I had just finished watching the original series -- both Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw -- in order, and once again marvelled at the excellence of how these complex stories and well-drawn characters were portrayed. Each one successively made me want to re-read the novels, all of which I devoured while in university. I was watching most of them for the third or fourth time.

I had seen the Bertie Carvel series, with growing disappointment, when it first came out, but I did not want to let the character go, so I watched both series again. As the others were now so fresh in my mind, I was horrified at the secondary casting. I can't think of a single one who compared favourably to the original casts. But the, like the principal, were hampered throughout by the stripped-down scripts and the simplified endings. The only two actors who had comparable quality to the roles' originators -- Jane Lapotaire and Michael Maloney -- were denied scripts that gave their roles any depth of meaning, and seeing Michael Maloney ushered into the police car completely ruined the whole point that the title of the episode suggested. The story in Shroud for a Nightingale was ripped through in such diluted form that the resolution seemed stuck on. With another "success" where originally Dalgliesh faced the frustration that dogs some of his cases.

There are many fine actors in these episodes -- Amanda Root, Richard Dillane, Stephen Mackintosh and others -- and if they had had better material they might have made the characters their own. But it is impossible when the stories are reduced to bare bones with simplistic endings. However I will watch the next series, and hope that the final scene of The Murder Room and its suggestion that the utterly misdirected Kate Miskin is really departing is fulfilled. Hinting at a love relationship growing between her and Dalgliesh is the ultimate betrayal of both characters.

I'm going back to the books.