With the rich and vibrant production values of a fine feature film - Seamus McGarvey (“Atonement,” “The Hours”) is director of photography, for heaven’s sake - it is a paean to place and character that wallows instead of races, unfurls instead of cuts. 1 Detective Agency” is about crime the same way, say, “Rescue Me” is about fire.
No case is too small, though most turn out to be a bit larger than they first seemed, and Precious is no armchair detective - she can wield a gun or a hunting knife just as effectively as she can her feminine intuition.īut “The Ladies No. Instead she wants to solve the everyday mysteries that plague the people around her: the husband who seems unfaithful, the dentist who has strange mood swings, the child who has gone missing. And she would like to help them.Īiding her quest are Grace, the straight-backed stickler of a secretary played with marvelous humor and humanity by Anika Noni Rose BK (Desmond Dube), the gay hairdresser whose salon is next door to the agency and JLB (Lucian Msamati), the solid and lovable mechanic who quickly becomes enamored with the lady detective.īut Precious is not looking for love - an abusive marriage has left her wounded and wary. After her father dies and leaves her wealth in the form of 180 cows, Precious leaves her village for the town of Gaborone where she becomes a detective because, she says, she loves her country, Botswana, and because people want to know things, to understand why things have happened to them. Into a world dominated by sociopaths, depressives, addicts and other broken heroes comes Precious, an earth mother in brightly colored batik, with her abiding belief in the basic goodness of life. Languid is not the goal of most detective shows, network or cable, but languid, in the best, lovely and strangely invigorating sense, this show is. Then somewhere amid the rising white dust and glimmering insects, it becomes clear that this show will restore the premium cable network to its former stature as the most surprising place on television.Īs the title would indicate, this is a criminal procedural, but not since Jane Marple upended the detective construct with her fleecy shawls and quiet parochial insights has there been a detective so outside the far-flung borders of convention. Precious slowly tells of her loving father and his insistence that she learn everything a boy would, and soon we learn that, as a child, she solved a village argument over the ownership of a cow. The patina of that remarkable pedigree is visible from the very first moment the camera soars over the verdant river banks and dusty plains, the haughty giraffes and startled meerkats, lighting then upon the modest village that’s home to Precious Ramotswe (Jill Scott).Įven before we see her on-screen, Scott, a three-time Grammy winner, is a revelation her summer-glazed creamy tones are the reason the voice-over was invented.
#FIRST LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES#
1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” is based on the successful series of the same name by Alexander McCall Smith and co-written and executive produced by Richard Curtis (“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “The Girl in the Cafe”) and the late Anthony Minghella (“Cold Mountain,” “The English Patient”). So we’ll go with what viewers experience first: the green and golden glory of Africa.
1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which premieres Sunday night on HBO, that it’s hard to choose which one to lead with.
There are so many reasons to watch “The No.
0 kommentar(er)
