Brit Crime

I've been enjoying Broadchurch immensely while not exactly understanding why it was so massively popular in England (almost as popular as Downton Abbey is what I heard). It's very good, with interesting detectives, and a murder case in which every townsperson is a suspect or a red herring. I'm about halfway through so we'll see how it plays out. I do like it a lot but I don't yet see why it's necessarily better than this past season of Endeavor, for example

Bringing us to Endeavor, naturally, in which Shaun Evans plays a young Inspector Morse, encountering Oxford's ridiculously high murder rate in 1966. It was a good season, but it was really topped off by a superb final episode, called Home, a wintry, moody two hours in which the stakes got raised very high. And as good as Evans is, Roger Allam is just as good as his hardnosed boss Thursday.

Then there's Luther. I just started it tonight. One hour of grimness and bleakness and violence and stress. I'm hoping they bring back Alice soon. She may be a serial killer and a psychopath but she brings some playfulness to the proceedings. I'm assuming she'll be back because I'm pretty sure I saw her in the promo, but there are already a lot of balls in the air from the pilot episode, including a romantic subplot with Idris Elba and Sienna Guillory. Luther is not a particular favorite but Elba is watchable in anything.