Kingdom

I came across this show, on youtube.com, trying to find shows featuring Dominic Mafham. I was pleasantly surprised in spite of the fact that he isn't a main character. It is a lawyer version of Northern Exposure. I do find Hermione Norris's character a bit irritating but I think it is because I enjoyed her so much in Wire in the Blood and I tend to dislike "lovable but crazy and destructive sibling" characters. The stories are light and simple with a little darkness sprinkled from the plot involving Simon Kingdom. I have only watched the first few episodes of the first season so that might change. Overall, I would recommend this show as a nice alternative to most American network television.

Stephen Fry, playing an attorney with a young, eager-beaver legal intern, lives and works in a small seaside town somewhere in England. The show has wit and charm--also, it delivers thematically with usually understated or just matter of fact truths about life. Fry is truly great in this role, where he is asked to be the man everyone likes and to whom they turn to solve their problems, legal and otherwise. His character's sister is over the top with obvious, but not major, psych problems. But she makes a great contrast to the almost always unflappable Fry. A special mention should go to the actress who plays Fry's secretary/receptionist. She helps to make the show seem real by being a good person whose presence helps Fry to solve the problems of the various denizens of this village. At 18 episodes, the show is incomplete---the final episode does not in any way wrap up the show or give a sense of an ending. Three good reasons why show stopped: cancelled--Brit t.v. is notorious for cancelling popular shows (did it with Foyle's War and outcry was so great that it was brought back for a few more shows); Fry is a millionaire who may have decided that he'd had enough; the episodes had covered a lot of ground in terms of what it's like to live in a small village with quirky characters and situations. Anyway, with all he junk on t.v., it is truly too bad that a quality show only gets 18 episodes. I believe that with a bit of creativity many more stories could have been engendered and not have been repetitive or boring.

Yes, it's just a fairy tale about a solicitor in a picturesque British market town, his wacky family, and equally eccentric clients and fellow townsmen, but I totally fell in love with it. Sadly, it only ran three years before being canceled for being costly to produce, but at least we have those three years. I recently watched it on Netflix and had a difficult time getting through the last two episodes. I kept pausing the streaming because I didn't want to get to the end of the series. Stephen Fry is simply wonderful as Peter Kingdom, but so is the rest of the cast in their roles as family, colleagues, and clients. This show is such a charmer, you might well fall in love with it too.

Great show and Fry was perfect... except for that sister. The sister character was actually quite difficult to watch (therefore, nicely played) but actually weakened the other characters and is irrelevant to the plot lines. This drew down the attractiveness of the show (2 points) and seemed to reflect a strange choice by the writer(s). It is almost like they were forced to put this character as a foil for Fry (and everyone else). There are cleverer ways to accomplish this that fit the arc of the plot lines without doing damage to the other characters. I wonder how many watchers mumble to themselves, "Just kick her butt out of the house and stop enabling!" Maybe its just me...

I never thought Stephen Fry was quite right for the role of Jeeves (Jeeves really is kind of a d*ck, after all), but here he's perfect. He plays Peter Kingdom, the white sheep in a family of "serial shaggers," sickos and sociopaths. A Cambridge-trained lawyer, he's been carrying on the family practice in a small Norfolk town after his father's death and his brother's suspicious disappearance, and as the series opens, his damaged half-sister, Beatrice, has checked out of a clinic and come to join him. Fry's large, affable figure doesn't always blend in with this murky background, but most of the episodes deal with the cozier, goofier side of English country life—Druids, crop circles, cricket, quiz night at the pub, the vicar's "rude vegetable" contest, lockkeeper's cottages and garden allotments; there's even a brief glimpse of morris dancing.

More serious subjects like the exploitation of migrant farmworkers, the Data Protection Act 1998 (which may or may not prohibit a father from filming his daughter's cello recital) and CCTV snooping are treated in soft focus, and plot lines tend to be resolved conveniently but not always plausibly (how does young Scott manage to steal that racehorse again?). Nevertheless, Fry and the writers do a wonderful job of portraying Peter Kingdom as a soulful local hero and an incorruptible champion of "hooman roights" (as the Norfolkers say, at least some of them); the jokes are pretty good (when Kingdom's lovelorn associate, Lyle, refers to himself as a "great catch," Kingdom replies, "So's a giant squid, but you wouldn't want to be leading one down the aisle"), the supporting cast is excellent (even Beatrice starts to grow on you) and the swelling, hymnlike theme music and the aerial shots of the gorgeous Norfolk coastline certainly help to get the job done. We burned through all 18 eps on streaming Netflix (now it's only available on disc I'm sorry to say) and were inconsolable when it was over.