I’ve been watching television again, and thinking about national stereotypes. By coincidence, a couple of similar series are out at the same time. They are both doing the “drop the first three episodes in one go and then the next three week-by-week” thing. They both have a mononymous title, and feature a natural loner reluctantly forced to team up with other people to unravel a shady conspiracy involving powerful people. They both use some of the same grammar of filming (is there a director these days who doesn’t love a drone shot of a moving car at night?), but beyond that they couldn’t be more different.
Reacher is the fourth series of the Amazon Prime juggernaut, based on the preposterously successful series of books by Lee Child. Reacher himself (Alan Ritchson) is a mountain of a man - Google tells me that he is 6 foot 4 and 240 pounds, but he looks a lot more than that to me. He’s not a man to mess with. (Part of the comedy of the third series was casting him opposite Olivier Richters, a man of 7 foot 2 and 350 pounds, and watching them chew each other up like a Transformers or Marvel superhero movie). But Reacher isn’t all brawn: he can stand in a subway carriage and provide descriptions of all his fellow passengers afterwards, and his back story as a military investigator shows how he used his brain to solve problems.
In contrast Ludwig (on iPlayer) is pretty much all brain. He’s played by David Mitchell, who is not a man you’d ever expect to bump into in a gym or to have a deep knowledge of his macros. And the character leans into every nerdy stereotype - Ludwig is a professional puzzle setter, with a wardrobe built up out of brown corduroys and tweeds. Setting the series in Cambridge helps make it seem more cerebral (even if it’s not hopping from college to college like Morse or Grantchester).
In terms of a review, I’d say they are both perfectly fine if you like that sort of thing. They are both building on previous series, and you know pretty much exactly what you are going to get from each by now. Further, in neither case does it make sense to think about it too much. Asking how does Reacher maintain his Mens’ Health physique while living off junk food and only exercising by punching henchmen and occasional foot chase scenes is not a worthwhile question. Similarly, don’t worry that puzzle setters aren’t semi-famous people who can live a nice lifestyle, when setting the Guardian cryptic is more of an occasional “freelance £200” thing.
But really I think the interesting thing is what the difference in these programmes tells us about our national characters these days. Despite the fact that the books were created by a Brummie, the Amazon Reacher couldn’t be more American. Reacher is a monster truck rally, a tailgate before a NASCAR race. He’s rooted in blues and cheesesteaks, and in drifting from town to town in small town America. Even the locations are blue collar: you are likely to find him punching people in bowling alleys, subway stations and on the docks.
Whereas Ludwig is almost aggressively a certain style of British stereotype. He’s Only Connect and QI. I’m fairly sure that he thinks Paddington Bear is a guide to modern living and that Count Binface is a legend. Whereas Reacher marches into a room and owns it, Ludwig bumbles in and apologises for himself - there was a running joke in the first series that he couldn’t drive, and in the second series he doesn’t understand how headphones work. The first two episodes of the new series found him solving murders in a West End theatre and at a stately home wedding - no danger of a crossover episode with Reacher there.
I’m not going to tell you which of these is better. Maybe Reacher would be more successful if he didn’t bounce people downstairs on their heads before hoping to interrogate them at the bottom. Maybe Ludwig is old enough to take some driving lessons and master the skills of living in the 21st Century.
But none of that is the point really. It’s more a question of leaning in and enjoying the stereotypes, and hoping to get to the bottom of the mysteries in both of these series before Reacher moves on to cause mayhem in a new town and before Ludwig has time to shop the new season collection in M&S. If that’s another sign of our divided and polarised society then so be it.
And I guess they invent locations because they can, and figure that only Cambridge residents or alumni will notice, and only the neurodivergent ones (ie approx 95% of the alumni, a somewhat lower proportion of the residents) will care.
Lovely piece.
Just a comment about Ludwig being “set in Cambridge”. Watching episode one of the new series it was apparent that there were numerous positioning shots (usually aerial) of Cambridge, but the actual locations for all the action tended to be anonymous houses or office blocks which could be (and possibly are) somewhere else entirely. And the theatre where the crime takes place most certainly is not in Cambridge, so why is it being investigated by Cambridge police?
Whereas Professor T (starting a new run on ITV the night before, and also featuring a neurodivergent genius crime solver) most certainly is set in Cambridge, with characters walking and talking in recognisable Cambridge locations (e.g. Portugal Place). However, the crime in this one was set on a yacht from which a character was lost at sea, so it was equally implausible that this crime was being investigated by a fictional Cambridge police force.
All of which pointless analysis proves that I am closer in personality to Ludwig than Reacher, though I absolutely love both.