Inside Man

This show is riddled with plot holes, it is inconsistent in tone, and baffling at times, but it's still a fun ride if you sit back and suspend disbelief and avoid analyzing it too deeply. If you struggle with unbelievable storylines or character decisions, this won't be for you. However, the actors performances hold up and you'll be wanting to see what happens next. It's a mix of older BBC murder mystery series, Sherlock, and a bunch of weird writing decisions in between. It's not a show you'll want to go out of your way for, but if you want a short series that's relatively mindless and entertaining, this will do the trick.

This show sets up some contrived circumstances, in the first episode, somewhat rapidly in succession. Without going into details it requires a fair bit of suspension of belief, because literally none of those events would occur anything like that.

There's language that people don't really use in real life, that are somewhat more common in niche circles - and I notice this is for some reason common in British, and in particular BBC television series. I'm not really sure what it is about the BBC, but they have a way of creating TV that is particularly out of touch with reality.

On the positive side the acting is fine, the characters would be fairly compelling if in slightly less contrived scenarios and it isn't boring by any means, it just has a persistent distracting quality about it.

My title says it all. Two of my pet plot peeves are stupidity (the characters do something stupid to move the plot forward) and contrivance (circumstances beyond credibility to move the plot forward). So masterful in so many ways, it is a shame that this plot seems written by a drunk amateur shouting out random ideas ("hey, and then this could happen!...").

The best bit was Stanley Tucci's and Atkin Estimond's neo-Sherlock/Watson rendition. Great character concept, actor pairing, and portrayal. The only downside (again) was the fairly contrived scenarios they were challenged to solve. But I could watch them banter all day.

I would reboot the series around Tucci and Estimond and hire a professional writer to focus on plot structure and you would have winner to rival "Sherlock" and "Elementary".

I decided to watch this despite mixed reviews because I love Stanley Tucci. As per usual, Stanley does a great job especially given the writing he had to work with. Tucci and the other death row inmate are fantastic together and it would be a much more interesting show if it was just based on them solving cases. Instead there is a horrible second story involving David Tennant. This is where the show goes off the rails. Tennant's character makes the worst decisions imaginable. I caught myself asking why countless times just during the first episode. It makes the show so unrealistic that it's practically unwatchable. Normally I see Tennant in great roles and I have no idea why he decided to take this part. He does a solid job but his character makes such poor decisions that I don't think any human would make regardless of their level of intelligence that it makes his part of the story very hard to watch. I've seen this in a couple other reviews but if you can throw all reality out the window while watching this, you'll probably enjoy it especially if you're a fan of Tucci or Tennant. If you prefer more realistic writing and decision making by the characters, this might be a hard watch for you. Essentially if you desperately need something to watch, give this a try but there are countless other shows that I would recommend before this one.

So much talent, actors and writers, but what a farce. They probably had to first come up with a list of plotholes to then write a story around it. I can't imagine running into so many problems when writing the story first... Every possible cliche is present. Should get stars only for that achievement.

• Empty phone battery
• Sudden and irrational change of mind at crucial point in story
• Calling each other and the others ignoring the call
• When they eventually answer the phone, talk about anything other than the thing they WANTED to get across
• Endless trivial discussions to actively ignore the topic you had to get off your chest. Next time, talk about the weather, at least *something* interesting to listen to.

• Ending up at the other side of the world for no apparent reason
• Convenient van to run over the one character that can make a difference.