9 ms·

This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch. David Tennant's character is notably very bad

• arethuza 9mo ago
  "David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town." Worth noting that in Hot Fuzz (also featuring Olivia Coleman!) the main character is exiled to a rural location for being too good at his job.
  • jacquesm 9mo ago
    That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
    • WalterBright 9mo ago
      Should watch "Zero Hour" (1957). "Airplane" is nearly a shot-for-shot remake, except it's done for laughs rather than a thriller. "I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!"
      • jacquesm 9mo ago
        Thank you, I will do that. Never heard of it before!
      • rapind 9mo ago
        Airplane! also features tons of other TV and movie references doesn’t it? Basically what would have happened in these well known shows and movies when you add absurd scenarios while still playing it straight (the joke is never acknowledged of course!).
        • samplatt 9mo ago
          Not just jokes and scenarios - it's full of many actors that for years (and decades) played very serious "leading man" type roles. Seeing all these all-american heroes just being utter idiots helped make it so impactful.
          • fhdkweig 9mo ago
            I was very confused when I recognized Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet. I had never seen him in a non-farcical comedy role.
        • seanc 9mo ago
          We had to pause the movie and explain to our kids who June Cleaver was. It was a fun echo, because when I was a kid I watched it with my parents, and my Mom had to explain to me who Ethel Merman was.
  • Insanity 9mo ago
    She’s also in Peep Show, which to this day is my favourite British television series. It’s such a good piece of dark comedy.
    • HPsquared 9mo ago
      And that's a show about people who are bad at relationships.
      • Insanity 9mo ago
        True! Two “losers” as protagonists
    • timthorn 9mo ago
      And the lesser known "Look Around You" which might also not land so well with an American audience. Thants.
      • vizzier 9mo ago
        For season 1 it very much satirises the early morning open university tv educational media format from the 70s through the early 2000s [1]. I'm not sure it'd land quite the same way for other countries or even for gen-z onwards. [1] https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/january/open-university https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/january/op...
        • timthorn 9mo ago
          I wondered, but my 15 year old loved it.
        • techterrier 9mo ago
          i think the skibidi toilet crew would love spiders on drugs
        • Aeolun 9mo ago
          That’s actually pretty cool. I can think of worse things to watch in the mornings.
  • nebula8804 9mo ago
    Warms my heart to see fellow Edgar Wright fans here. Felt bad about his recent film results. I waited years for that. :/
    • tialaramex 9mo ago
      I saw Baby Driver, which I really liked but I haven't seen any of the three movies since that. The Cornetto trilogy are excellent. I'm a big fan of Three Colours (my favourite is White) and I think that actually in the same way that Kieślowski clearly doesn't care about the supposed theme, he just wants money to make movies, we can say the same for the Cornetto movies. We're bringing the commonalities to it in our interpretation, Wright didn't pour great effort into ensuring that these movies "work" as a trilogy, but they do if you squint, in the same way that Kieślowski didn't put great effort into relating his three films to the French flag but if you squint you can make it work fine.
      • nebula8804 9mo ago
        At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business unfortunately and his last two films did poorly Last Night In Soho was a absolute cinematic treat but had mixed reviews. I was fortunate to see it a week before release in 35mm in NYC and it was truly a special moment. But lets be real, even with films being graded on a curve due to the pandemic, the movie still did poorly. Ok fresh start a few years later with The Running Man. This time he got big money, three time more than Baby Driver. (34mil vs 110mil) and the result? Baby Driver brought in ~227 mil and Running Man? Just ~69 mil. Maybe he is better off producing smaller budget films and while I want nothing but success for him since he's my all time favorite director: Hollywood is a business. They will not look kindly on someone that keeps losing money.
        • chilmers 9mo ago
          To be fair to Wright, there were a bunch of big budget movies in 2025 that flopped: Thunderbolts, Tron Ares, Snow White, etc. There’s definitely a wider phenomenon at work of cinema struggling in general. But I agree, Wright’s big-budget career is likely over.
  • eli_gottlieb 9mo ago
    The older I get, the more I suspect the Neighborhood Watch Alliance of being behind all society's problems.
  • hbarka 9mo ago
    In the 12th century a Welsh writer named Walter Map wrote the line "no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded". Not quite English but maybe he was already expressing the whimsy of the English kingdom.
  • Cthulhu_ 9mo ago
    A lot of people cite Hot Fuzz as one of the best examples in filmmaking. Almost everything is a setup for a joke or scene that resolves later on in the film.
• ravishi 9mo ago
  That sounds awfully similar to our own reading of Department Q. I'll watch it too.
  • bee_rider 9mo ago
    Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence. Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
    • talldan 9mo ago
      My recollection is that the main guy is a highly competent at problem solving, but limited by an inability to work with others. In some ways similar to Lamb in Slow Horses, though I think Lamb is a very good manipulator of people (he gets others to do what he wants without telling them directly), whereas the Dep. Q guy doesn't engage at all.
• danaris 9mo ago
  Sounds like a much-more-fleshed-out version of Inspector Gadget!
• haritha-j 9mo ago
  That reminds me a lot of slow horses as well.
  • dclowd9901 9mo ago
    Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
    • catlover76 9mo ago
      > such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. Hmm really? In the first couple episodes, he definitely is, but I think they level him out a bit later on so that the viewer actually ends up liking him. In the books, he is much more consistently unlikable. (Don't bother with the books, IMO--show is better while still hewing quite close to them).
      • dclowd9901 9mo ago
        Yeah, I mean he has a lot of really strong flaws that almost seem purposefully to put one off (which could be his whole angle, who knows), but between his drinking, terrible health, horrid treatment of his team (who, yes I know, he actually does care for), you're often not on his side, but more eager to see how what he's put in place will unfold.
      • saispas 9mo ago
        Other way round, IMO of course … For me the books have depth that the TV series doesn't – and can't – have: some of the plots are dumbed down a bit to give more visual impact, and of course you don't get the same depth of characterisation, or the insights into Lamb's and the others' pasts because much of it comes out in interior monologue, and it's much harder for the shows to, erm, show. And you miss one of the glories of Herron's writing: as a stylist is on a par with Terry Prachett for cramming wisdom into short witty phrases. He is very good at memorable phrases skewering contemporary life, and particularly politicians. The shows bring some of this out, but there's only so much that you can do in dialogue. Take this passage from the first book: > Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-haired and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations – Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! – Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which thought him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids’ nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. (‘Damn fine city,’ he’d remarked on a trip to Paris. ‘Probably worth defending next time.’) Not everyone who’d worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who’d witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he’d either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle. Herron, Mick. Slow Horses: The bestselling thrillers that inspired the hit Apple TV+ show Slow Horses (Slough House Thriller 1) (p. 187). (Function). Kindle Edition. That is a brilliant piece of characterisation, and if you know anything about British politics, you know exactly who he's describing, and how accurate a character assassination this is. The TV show's Peter Judd goes out of its way to make the character a lot more generic – their Judd is merely 'typical cynical nasty venal politician' and it loses a bit of force accordingly. Or take the set piece descriptions which start every book: they recreate the seedy world of Slough House in a way that the shows can only hint at. Not to say the shows aren't very good – they are one of the best things on TV – but the books are even better. IMO, of course…
• pjc50 9mo ago
  This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy Peep Show.
  • gryfft 9mo ago
    Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack. (Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)* *(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
    • IAmBroom 9mo ago
      "MELLAH!" There is no 'r' in Miller.
      • gryfft 9mo ago
        Quite right; please forgive the error in transliteration.
    • amiga386 9mo ago
      If you'd like some comedy in your police procedural, watch A Touch of Cloth It's a parody of all British police procedurals simultaneously. It's the Airplane! of police shows... I won't say it's the Police Squad! of police shows, because that was spoofing US tropes, this spoofs UK tropes, but yes it's full of very serious actors saying very unserious things. And yes, it has a gruff Scottish man (John Hannah) as lead D.I. Jack Cloth
      • jodrellblank 9mo ago
        Thirty years ago there was The Thin Blue Line, a sitcom set in a police station in the UK, starring Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean, Blackadder) and written by Ben Elton (writer on Mr Bean and Blackadder). I suspect it wouldn’t stand up to much rewatching today, but it was a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Blue_Line_(British_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Blue_Line_(British_TV...
• mjd 9mo ago
  “In an American police procedural, we would either have…” In the first minutes of the American show “Keen Eddie”, the titular character bungles a project so badly that he is exiled to London. It unfortunately lasted only one season.
• d-us-vb 9mo ago
  Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective! When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch. I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
• biophysboy 9mo ago
  The game Disco Elysium is kind of like this. Just know that the game is 99% reading and rolling dice.
  • Sharlin 9mo ago
    …sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
    • biophysboy 9mo ago
      Ha! Not the way I played him as a character :)
  • aetherson 9mo ago
    Apropos of nothing besides the mention of Disco Elysium, I present to you the best item in a CRPG: https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Volumetric_Shit_Compressor https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Volumetric_Shit_Compres...
  • stavros 8mo ago
    Also a masterpiece.
• IAmBroom 9mo ago
  My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent. "Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!" "What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons." "Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..." Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
• ksymph 9mo ago
  Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all. I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
  • gryfft 9mo ago
    It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since. I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
    • tartuffe78 9mo ago
      It's very explicitly explained in the finale.
      • gryfft 9mo ago
        Alas, my think-meat is fallible and forgetful. I shall have to refresh myself and give it another watch.
• KineticLensman 9mo ago
  > Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
• kranner 9mo ago
  > Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. You might enjoy Joyce Porter’s Dover series.
• hoten 9mo ago
  Did you know there is a American reboot of broadchurch also starring David Tennant? It's called Gracepoint. I haven't seen it myself, but I wonder if it conforms to your theory: does the detective in that show have mitigating explanations for his failures?
• scotty79 9mo ago
  Well, he was good at not quitting.
• jameshart 9mo ago
  This is also the core conceit of Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman AppleTV show. An office filled with MI5 officers who screwed up and so can’t be trusted with anything important.
  • roesel 9mo ago
    Except in Slow Horses, most of them are exceptional at least in some way. Many of them are too difficult to work with, yes, but they do excel at _something_. That is very different from being _all around mediocre_.
  • latexr 9mo ago
    I haven’t seen Broadchurch, but I have seen Slow Horses and it doesn’t seem like the description applies. Sure, they are “exiled” MI5 officers, but they also save the day every season, and not through luck. They’re not completely incompetent. Take River: he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made. Ho was sent there due to character flaws, despite being the most skilled at his job.
    • something765478 9mo ago
      > he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made. No, he was sent to Slough house over his reaction to that mistake. He disobeyed orders, caused panic at an airport, and assaulted a civilian. Now, that would have been fine if he was trying to save lives, but the whole thing was just a training exercise! He deliberately put people in danger just to massage his own ego; he absolutely deserved to be "exiled".
• rurp 9mo ago
  It's been some years since I watched the show so I've probably forgotten a fair amount, but I remember it differently. I recall Tennant arguing at various points that it's probably the more obvious suspect/explanation. It's the whole you're probably hearing horses not zebras thing. Which in reality is the more competent approach. Crimes usually are committed by the most obvious suspect and pursuing more obscure theories is a worse approach. But of course in a TV universe that's completely flipped on its head, nobody makes shows about normal straightforward cases. This same conflict bugged me about the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The main analyst is 1000% sure that her hunch is correct and is constantly aggressively adamant about it, despite a lack of hard evidence. The others analysts are shown being much more rational, giving probabilities to their assessments and grounding conclusions in evidence. But since it's a movie of course you know the heroine is going to be correct and all of the other people seems like indecisive fools. But in reality someone who acted like her would be an absolute train wreck and the sober rational ones would be getting things done consistently with far fewer screw ups.
  • deanCommie 9mo ago
    Speaking of Zero Dark Thirty, it has WAY more problems than that - https://www.tiktok.com/@trademoviespodcast/video/7565361705665023262 https://www.tiktok.com/@trademoviespodcast/video/75653617056...