Luther

So, having heard a lot of hype and praise about the TV series Luther, I thought I would give it a go. And, by God, watching that first episode of the second series was an utter waste of my ever-diminishing life.

Shot like a Hollywood movie, the director seemed to think that Luther is an epic piece of drama. It isn't, of course. It's a BBC One detective series almost determined to be gritty but without a gritty plot to back it up. In fact, the plot (in as much as I could follow it having not seen the first series) is pretty hysterical and ludricrous. For example, it isn't enough just to have a drug-addicted teenager forced into pornography. No, it has to be some sort of rapey necro-porn - because the alternative just isn't bad enough for this series.

But that's the sub-plot. The main plot seems to be about a serial killer modelling himself as Springheeled Jack. He attacks people and kills them for attention. While wearing a mask. It is all pretty pathetic - an attempt to make a serial killer even more scary through giving him a gimmick. Because, y'know, serial killers aren't scary enough in their own right now, are they? However this serial killer is a sort of hamfisted attempt to cross the ludricrous killer in the Saw movies with the Joker. The former works because he is so over-the-top in his crimes that it just about works (for the first grim entry in that ever more crappy film franchise) and the latter because he is just so arbitrary. The killer in this episode of Luther is just an attention-seeking slasher with a crap mask and a crap back story. No doubt this killer will build up to some sort of climactic orgy of violence. Whatever. Based on this episode, he doesn't work as a character so much as a motive force for the plot.

Furthermore, the pacing of the plot is all over the place. About half way through the first episode, there is a pointless chase and then confrontation between the detective and the killer. What does this add to the story? Nothing. Pure padding. What could be the alternative? Well, possibly them doing real police work, although that might be considered by the makers too boring for this sort of show. And then the climax/cliffhanger is misdirected in the extreme - even if you haven't come across this sort of "twist" before, the direction is so lumpen that any excitement is drained away from that twist.

Then we have the most extraordinarily misjudged performances in this piece. All the women seem to have been told to act in the most mannered way possible, like they have just discovered the English language and are trying out new accents and verbal mannerisms. The men, however, just seemed bored by what is going on. Idris Elba, playing the title character, is laconic to the point of comatose. Unlike in The Wire, where he managed to turn in an utterly convincing as Stringer Bell, here he is the very definition of an actor going through the motions. But that is nothing compared to the extraordinary performance from theworstdoctorwhointheworldever Paul McGann - where the actor actually seems to want to fall asleep onset because he just does not care about the drama he is appearing in. Again, if this is supposed to be gritty, then it needs gritty - not bad and bored - performances.

And Luther himself seems to be a detective with remarkably little common sense and poor observational skills. His decision, for example, after he has witnessed the murder of an innocent person on a fucking webcam is to send two crucial members of his team to take a witness back to her home. Frankly, with prioritisation skills like that, he deserves to fail. And there is the wonderful moment when he wanders around the largely empty flat of the serial killer wondering why the flat has been left empty despite that there is a fucking phone in front of him. Again, detectives like this deserve to fail.

But the worst thing is that somewhere in the farrago of bollocks and utter nonsense there's a good story struggling to get out. However, that story needs a lot more work than this production team seemed willing to give it. Above all, someone needed to give more thought to the tone of the whole thing. There is a place for police procedurals, and for serial killer stories, and for hysterical, over-the-top stories about the boogeyman made real. However, to combine those three different types of story together, you need to put a lot of thought into it. Sadly, the makes of this programme seem unwilling to do that, and hope that crudely grafting a number of different genres together is enough to get the result you want. This episode proves that it really, really isn't.