A god-bothering sleuth pits his wits against the aristocracy, hoi polloi and the staggeringly incompetent and racist officers of the law of the Cotswolds. For the most part the characters are stereotyped, but the main characters do grow, both in depth and for the most part likeability.
I cringe almost every time a copper is in a scene because of their stupefying ineptness. The 3rd Detective Inspector is by far the worst example I’ve ever come across anywhere, ever.
Despite the aforementioned, I do like the show.
Review by TenBlockedParent2013-01-26T10:10:39Z
The sum total of the ten episodes: The Fluff of crime-solving genre.
First, don't go watching it for puzzles. They are obvious in the first five minutes after happening. Clues are obvious. Everything is pretty obvious to a casual lover of detective shows, the plots are not the attraction here to anyone with some spare brain cells.
The screenwriters, apparently, placed their faith with the characters. If you find yourself liking them - by all means, go ahead and watch. The characters are pretty universally kind, gentle, family-friendly in every way. As I've noticed almost instantly, not one opinion of a character we are rooting for is questionable. It's as if every one was supposed to be likeable.
Acting is okay, interplay is funny and believable for the most part, inevitable moral lessons notwithstanding. Production is picture-book-like, as clean and pastoral as the rest of it.
I'll freely admit that for the first couple of eps I wondered why I should care about the stories any, but then the warm-up to the chars happened and I found myself looking forward to the rest of the series, in a "tea-and-blanket-and-TV-on-winter-evening" way.
What I wish they could have done differently:
Since we have a priest here, a community-facing person, and since they had set out to rewrite the Chesterton source material completely anyway (and they did), they could've gone up a more social-controversy-puzzles route. Alternately, a more puzzling-puzzles route.
But then, we'd get Maigret/Poirot respectively, and this show would have no reason to exist.