Luther

Luther (2010) 

The first season is excellent. A cop whose total inner conflict borders on ancient tragedy and whose confrontations with the seductively psychopathic Alice are reminiscent of introspective glances in a mirror that reveals what you would rather keep buried deep underground. On top of that, we have unpleasantly realistic crimes, which are rather more an impetus for psychological games between the investigators and the investigated (the most frequent victims are police officers) than for the standard revelation of the killer’s identity (which is soon revealed in most cases). And of course, the devastating finale, escalated almost as intensively as the end of the third episode of Sherlock, which takes the protagonist’s unhappiness to the edge of creative sadism. With its undiluted seriousness and intensified brutality, the second season steps over that edge. It too frequently and obviously assumes that the villain will act in a certain way and, lo and behold, that’s really how the villain acts. The series’ creators make use of perhaps every cliché from super-dark crime shows, which are disparaged in A Touch of Cloth. It’s as if it was enough for them that Luther is fucked and they can no longer be bothered with further developing his character. So, they replaced Alice with a different off-the-rails yet much less interesting female character, who could at most be the protagonist’s daughter, not his dark side. Luther’s demons were more or less pacified (in the final episode, he behaves simply like a headcase, not like a man fanatically devoted to his principles) in the interest of scenes that powerfully reek of sentiment. However, the truth is that Elba, who incidentally is blessed with exactly the kind of charisma that an actor needs to play Bond, consistently hands in a phenomenal performance and some of the unpleasantly confrontational, voyeuristic shots of brutality call for a more extensive study of the depiction of violence in television detective shows. 80% (09/12/2012)