A sleep aid, but intellectual
On plodding along through "Shakespeare & Hathaway: Private Investigators"
Silly mysteries are their own wonderful category. The ones where it’s a comedy, but posing as a mystery. Midsomer Murders of course, but also Rosemary and Thyme, and the early Poirot eps. (Compelling but not silly: The Bridge, Shetland, Broadchurch.) If you’re just sort of conking out before bed, maybe you don’t want a cliffhanger about who a severed limb belongs to, and would rather just watch people be petty and ridiculous in small English villages.
With that in mind, I started watching Shakespeare & Hathaway. It’s about a ragtag team of private investigators: schlubby ex-cop Frank Hathaway, pretty-boy (this is a good thing) assistant Sebastian, and mega-basic (also a good thing) business partner Luella Shakespeare. (Think Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde, but not as upscale.) Shakespeare joins Hathaway in the first episode, after she hires him to trail her good-for-nothing fiancé. (It is barely a spoiler to say that the fiancé doesn’t last.) They do the usual mystery-show thing of solving crimes better than police detectives.
The show’s specificity is right there in the name: Shakespeare. Ever hearda him? It’s set in Stratford, and contains many levels of Shakespeare references, so many that even yours truly, ignoramous whose post-high-school knowledge of classics is for complicated reasons French not English, occasionally catches on. Characters have Shakespearean names, his plays are quoted (and, occasionally, part of the plot), and Sebastian, he of the Harry Styles but taller (actually I have no idea how tall Styles is) quality, is an aspiring Shakespearean actor. (Sometimes, handsome is obvious. That’s also allowed.) I think the idea with the Shakespeare twist is to make you think you’re doing something intellectual while you watch a crime show with slightly less to it than some. Does it work? Not exactly, but I guess it adds to the British scenery or whatever. I have no idea.
If I don’t love the show, it’s partly that I resent being told my watching of nonsense television requires a highbrow (or at least, canonical) angle. It’s also that there is an insects scene, which is the sort of thing that should get trigger warnings but never does. Also, also, that there’s a magic-act episode, and I’m sorry but magicians accidentally killing people during a trick, it has been done, and each time is done less interestingly than the previous.
And then there’s Hathaway himself, whose shabbiness is meant to be charming, but I am not charmed. Just another head-in-the-clouds, too-brilliant-to-bathe solitary male genius, without really transcending the trope. Why is he at the center of the show? Something is hinted about a backstory: why he left the police, and what exactly was his relationship was with the (far more conventionally attractive) lady-detective who represents their rivals in the police force itself. Maybe this will go somewhere. Or maybe I’ll get Netflix and never have to find out.