The Inspector Lynley Mysteries

Great stories, good acting and compelling but somehow I am so down after watching these.

I have really enjoyed this series. I have not read any of the books so I cannot comment on how true it is to them and really do not care. As a stand alone series I love all of the characters and I especially think Nathaniel Parker is a beautiful man and he and Sharon Small have an excellent chemistry. It is a dark show and the characters are neither perfect nor brilliant and they solve crime the old fashioned way. In other words, it is very non-Hollywood. I don't know how indicative they are of how crimes are investigated in Britain but I assure you CSI isn't even remotely close to how things are done in the US. I also like that the characters are not in their 20's and are mature, seasoned people. This is the only series that I have actually purchased. I cannot praise this show enough. I did not give it 10 stars simply because I know it isn't perfect.

I find this series very satisfying. It is character driven and has compelling dialog between Lynley and Sgt Havers. Havers is the real star of the show. She has very real problems in addition to working with her ponce of a boss. She lives paycheck to paycheck while caring for her parents, who suffer from dementia. How she juggles this situation with the need to be seconded to different locations to work on cases creates real angst in her character. In comparison, Lynley's problems are more social, as he frequently moralizes over dilemmas in his love life. Still, the rich detective and the hardscrabble sergeant work well with one another while solving cases that are twisty and intelligent. Like CSI, many of the cases are fashioned after recent cases in the news, so to say they are far fetched is not true. Try it out. You'll like the series.

I have now rewatched several of these, and have refined my appreciation.

The usual models for these sorts of projects is to distribute the episodes among different directors and screenwriters, assuming that the continuing characters are what matters. This series is different. The producers kept a firm hand on the way the episodes are framed; there is a consistent framework carried from one to the other that understand George's structure perhaps better than she does herself.

There is a murder or two. The dynamics of this murder happen in their own word, a world of madness or unraveled anger. The sense behind this is fantastically abstract, and is framed by a sort of soap opera centered on the events and characters that are suspects.

A more human, immediate layer — an entire third world — is the soap opera of a quite different nature in the lives of the continuing characters: Lynley and Havers. He is derived from Peter Wimsey, a second order aristocrat engaged in justice for his own reason. He has friends and lovers. Havers is an abrasive young lower class woman, struggling with family issues. This world is layered as well between Lynley and Havers.

One can easily imagine George seeing herself as Havers, watching and commenting on Lynley as he tries to understand the dynamics of the world he has entered to solve the crime, and find the embedded "world of motive."

This layered narrative format is understood by the producers of the series. Significant attention is paid to camera distance to register intimacy or lack of it. In particular, Havers is always the omphalos of the thing. Sharon Small is the actress who has taken on this central role and she is simply magnificent in it. She has the job of being a person in the thing, but that is an ordinary chore for an actor. She also has to be the observer and observer of the observer as the writer's surrogate. We never lose sight of the fact that this is a novelist's construction and she has included herself in the world as its origin.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I've just finished watching the whole series over a period of a month or so. This series is hard to rate, due to inconsistency -- not the actors' fault - the writing for these series is distinctly weird. It starts off as a pretty good series, then sometime around the middle or end of S2 it becomes distinctly bad, then for s3 and maybe early s4, almost too bad to watch, then it gets tolerably good again.

I didn't mind the replacement of Helen, in fact I thought the last Helen was the best of the lot. If she had been Helen all along, the series would have been better IMHO.

I haven't read the books and, given the horrible clichéd writing of many of the episodes that were based on the books, I am disinclined to.