I'm not a big fan of detective and crime shows in general. I don't usually care whodunit and often, by the first commercial break and a glass of wine, I've forgotten just what was done. Recently, scanning the schedules in desperation for something other than trashy reality shows I landed on "Lewis". Well, that's daft, I thought when I saw the name. Fancy trying to milk the popularity of "Morse" by featuring his more mundane sidekick. How wrong I was.
"Lewis" turned out to be "strangely magnetic" in the words of an Oxford academic friend of mine - who should know what she's talking about. True, it was a bit schlocky but what glorious schlock it was - all those bonkers deaths and bizarre corpses: pokers through the eyeball St Sebastian-style arrows on a naked corpse, brains bashed out by a bust of Vulcan - the more academic the murder the better.
Of course as a detective show, it had to make that strange emotional demand on the audience that the genre makes as a matter of course: that we engage with the dilemmas, angst, heartaches etc of people we've only just met (the victims and perpetrators) , who have no back- story but just come in, maybe do something terrible, are then found out and get about 5 minutes of really big, almost gigantic, acting before being carted off in a hearse or police van. That explains the presence of all the well-known thespians in the casts. In the meantime, the detectives, whom some of the audience have been dropping in on for almost a decade of their lives, don't get developed that much. We get just the occasional teasing glimpse of who they are, where they live, what they want. It's a tantalizing and, frankly, frustrating genre for all but the most avid puzzle-solver.
But still the show exerted that magnetic force. A Cambridge friend of mine confessed that he was just happy to pour a glass of sherry and gaze at "the gorgeous golden light on those Oxford rooftops." I soon found out that all sorts of people I know have been quietly devoted to the series that I had scorned for years: a lonely airline pilot on layovers, a similarly lonely opera singer, the guy who fixed my boiler this week and my friend's firefighter son in the backwoods of Canada. They described it variously as "reassuring, comforting, beautiful, batty, excessive" and had all grown deeply fond of the workaday, stolid Lewis and his cosy bond with his young brilliant sidekick Hathaway. Add to this, the show's surprising sexual "heat" in the form of this same gangly, blonde, virtually celibate, DS Hathaway, and the magnetism was guaranteed.
And so this week, Lewis, Hathaway and those golden rooftops left us, ostensibly, forever.
In a "closing of the circle", Hathaway took Lewis to Heathrow airport where he'd picked him up 10 years earlier. Robbie was wearing a Hawaiian shirt then and a plumper, greyer Robbie wore a Hawaiian shirt now. A very boyish, unmarked young Hathaway picked him up then ; a harder, wearier man drops him off now. But where Lewis was the lonely widower, he now leaves for New Zealand with the lovely Laura. His circle is complete. And the deep loneliness belongs entirely to Hathaway whose story seems to have been left suspended in mid-air in the Heathrow terminal. Ever the steadfast tin soldier, he manages just a pat on Lewis's back as the older detective leaves.
The loneliest of cops in a profession of lonely men, Hathaway ends the series watching sadly from the terminal as one of his father figures, Lewis, flies away across the world. Meanwhile, his real father awaits in the care home, demented and unable to recognize the son with whom he never formed a real bond. I reached for the box of Kleenex as the ever-excellent Laurence Fox walked towards the camera for the last time. But I was left unsatisfied by this part of the drama: Hathaway's character and his story feel uncomfortably unfinished.
That rule about "no love life" for the cops was first established, I think, back as far as 1928 by American art critic William Huntingdon Wright who said: "There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar." (The Americans often throw that rule clean out of the window : q.v. dumpy Detective Sipowitz's shower scene in NYPD)
In the case of Hathaway, perhaps the writers took that rule a tad too far. Nobody expects shower scenes - the cops in "Lewis" don't get to remove a sock though Hathaway did once take off his tie to imitate phone sex! And it would have been a disaster to domesticate him or give him a standard happy ending. But here was this brilliant, detached, emotionally and sexually repressed character who was never given quite enough to do.
Passionate, buttoned-up Hathaway who longed for connection but had no idea how to to achieve it, managed just a couple of liaisons in the decade he was on our screens. One in, "Life Born of Fire" almost had him burned to death before it was consummated, and the other in, "The Dead of Winter" resulted in a betrayal by an accomplice to murder.
So we left this shy, yearning, sexy character with no arc, no resolution, not much of anything. I'm hoping that means that he may well show up again in a spin-off, a one-off drama, a Christmas special - something that might give a great actor a chance to do more than, in Fox's own words: "ask where someone was between 8 and12pm." I've a few ideas of my own if ITV are interested but please, don't leave him wandering the lonely corridors of Heathrow. He, and Laurence Fox, deserve so much more.
"Lewis" turned out to be "strangely magnetic" in the words of an Oxford academic friend of mine - who should know what she's talking about. True, it was a bit schlocky but what glorious schlock it was - all those bonkers deaths and bizarre corpses: pokers through the eyeball St Sebastian-style arrows on a naked corpse, brains bashed out by a bust of Vulcan - the more academic the murder the better.
Of course as a detective show, it had to make that strange emotional demand on the audience that the genre makes as a matter of course: that we engage with the dilemmas, angst, heartaches etc of people we've only just met (the victims and perpetrators) , who have no back- story but just come in, maybe do something terrible, are then found out and get about 5 minutes of really big, almost gigantic, acting before being carted off in a hearse or police van. That explains the presence of all the well-known thespians in the casts. In the meantime, the detectives, whom some of the audience have been dropping in on for almost a decade of their lives, don't get developed that much. We get just the occasional teasing glimpse of who they are, where they live, what they want. It's a tantalizing and, frankly, frustrating genre for all but the most avid puzzle-solver.
But still the show exerted that magnetic force. A Cambridge friend of mine confessed that he was just happy to pour a glass of sherry and gaze at "the gorgeous golden light on those Oxford rooftops." I soon found out that all sorts of people I know have been quietly devoted to the series that I had scorned for years: a lonely airline pilot on layovers, a similarly lonely opera singer, the guy who fixed my boiler this week and my friend's firefighter son in the backwoods of Canada. They described it variously as "reassuring, comforting, beautiful, batty, excessive" and had all grown deeply fond of the workaday, stolid Lewis and his cosy bond with his young brilliant sidekick Hathaway. Add to this, the show's surprising sexual "heat" in the form of this same gangly, blonde, virtually celibate, DS Hathaway, and the magnetism was guaranteed.
And so this week, Lewis, Hathaway and those golden rooftops left us, ostensibly, forever.
In a "closing of the circle", Hathaway took Lewis to Heathrow airport where he'd picked him up 10 years earlier. Robbie was wearing a Hawaiian shirt then and a plumper, greyer Robbie wore a Hawaiian shirt now. A very boyish, unmarked young Hathaway picked him up then ; a harder, wearier man drops him off now. But where Lewis was the lonely widower, he now leaves for New Zealand with the lovely Laura. His circle is complete. And the deep loneliness belongs entirely to Hathaway whose story seems to have been left suspended in mid-air in the Heathrow terminal. Ever the steadfast tin soldier, he manages just a pat on Lewis's back as the older detective leaves.
The loneliest of cops in a profession of lonely men, Hathaway ends the series watching sadly from the terminal as one of his father figures, Lewis, flies away across the world. Meanwhile, his real father awaits in the care home, demented and unable to recognize the son with whom he never formed a real bond. I reached for the box of Kleenex as the ever-excellent Laurence Fox walked towards the camera for the last time. But I was left unsatisfied by this part of the drama: Hathaway's character and his story feel uncomfortably unfinished.
That rule about "no love life" for the cops was first established, I think, back as far as 1928 by American art critic William Huntingdon Wright who said: "There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar." (The Americans often throw that rule clean out of the window : q.v. dumpy Detective Sipowitz's shower scene in NYPD)
In the case of Hathaway, perhaps the writers took that rule a tad too far. Nobody expects shower scenes - the cops in "Lewis" don't get to remove a sock though Hathaway did once take off his tie to imitate phone sex! And it would have been a disaster to domesticate him or give him a standard happy ending. But here was this brilliant, detached, emotionally and sexually repressed character who was never given quite enough to do.
Passionate, buttoned-up Hathaway who longed for connection but had no idea how to to achieve it, managed just a couple of liaisons in the decade he was on our screens. One in, "Life Born of Fire" almost had him burned to death before it was consummated, and the other in, "The Dead of Winter" resulted in a betrayal by an accomplice to murder.
So we left this shy, yearning, sexy character with no arc, no resolution, not much of anything. I'm hoping that means that he may well show up again in a spin-off, a one-off drama, a Christmas special - something that might give a great actor a chance to do more than, in Fox's own words: "ask where someone was between 8 and12pm." I've a few ideas of my own if ITV are interested but please, don't leave him wandering the lonely corridors of Heathrow. He, and Laurence Fox, deserve so much more.