Not a Book: Ludwig

Happy Sunday everyone and hilariously this post was mostly written before I realised that in order to compare something to Jonathan Creek, I probably needed to explain what Jonathan Creek was and why I love it because it is somewhat vintage these days and I am old. So now I’ve done that, my review of Ludwig will make more sense…

Ludwig is a six-part detective drama-comedy series starring David Mitchell as John, an anti-social puzzle designer and Anna Maxwell Martin as his sister-in-law Lucy. In the first episode Lucy sends for John to help as her husband, his identical twin brother James has gone missing. James is a police detective and has left her a letter of resignation as well as some instructions. Lucy says that James has changed over recent months and rather than submit his resignation or report him missing she wants John to pretend to be James and infiltrate the police. Thus starts the running plot of the series alongside a murder of the week each episode.

I described this series to one of my work colleagues as Jonathan Creek but with puzzles instead of magic and a running plot beyond Creek’s will they or won’t they in the Maddie years. I struggled whether to call it a drama or a dramedy or a drama comedy in the description at the top because there is humour but it’s not laugh-track sitcom funny (or at least what sitcoms are aiming for) and if the comedy to drama scale has Brooklyn 99 at the comedy end and something really bleak at the other, this one falls somewhere closer to the halfway point than to the Brooklyn 99 end. It’s got less jokes than Deadloch but it’s also nowhere near as bleak as the final episode of that gets (which was nearly too far for me).

I really enjoyed the murder of the week element, but I did worry how they were going to resolve the fact that John was pretending to be a police officer – and what might happen to those cases that he had solved. But actually it sorted that pretty neatly in the end. And it’s got a lot of familiar faces to me in the various murder cases – mostly people who I’ve seen in the theatre more than on TV – like Hammed Animashaun who was one of the scene stealing thugs in the Kiss Me, Kate I loved so much last summer.

This has already been commissioned for a second series, which is good news for a number of reasons. If you haven’t watched it yet, it’s on the iPlayer now in the UK, but I’m not sure what the international streaming situation is – BritBox US’s website doesn’t work properly for me because I’m in the UK and I can’t face setting up a VPN just to find that out!

Have a great Sunday everyone!