Brilliantly Unsubtle
Spot-on review here, which I enjoyed:
Luther: brilliantly unsubtle
The detective show with audacious storylines involving unrealistic gimmicky murders is back for a second series
It goes without saying that BBC1 has too many detectives, but at least each of them manages to fulfil a different role. Sherlock is the populist detective, Wallander is the highbrow detective, George Gently is the detective for old people and, at least until his series was axed, Zen was the detective who seemed to think he was making the world's longest Nespresso advert. And then there's Luther. Luther, as if you need to be told, is the brilliant detective.
The fact that Luther is back for a second series tonight, despite decreasing ratings last year, pleases me enormously. Nothing else on television can match its constant absurdity. No other show can teeter on the brink of outright failure quite as fearlessly. It's too stupid to live, but somehow it's become too incredible to die.
Part of Luther's brilliance is its inability to understand the concept of subtlety. For example, the final episode of the first series ended with Luther, along with the man who Luther's wife had left him for and Luther's sexy serial killer gal pal, tracking down Luther's best friend (who had just killed Luther's aforementioned wife, by the way) and shooting him in the head for trying to frame Luther for her death. Which isn't really a storyline you'd expect from, say, Midsomer Murders, but it's a hell of a starting point for a new series.
If anything, series two has managed to ratchet up the idiocy even further. Two minutes into the first episode, Luther holds a loaded gun to his head. Five minutes in and – despite the whole death wish thing – it's revealed he has returned to the police force to head up a department called, to paraphrase, the Massively Unrealistic Gimmicky Murder Squad. Which is just as well because there are always a lot of massively unrealistic gimmicky murders for Luther to solve, whether they're committed by blood-draining satanists or taxi drivers with erectile dysfunction or – as with tonight's episode – a kind of walking, talking Saw doll with a sideline in dreary local trivia.
Holding the entire show together, as always, is Idris Elba. You'll remember Elba's last big role was in Thor, where he played a giant Viking who guards an intergalactic rainbow bridge that's made out of dreams or something. Well, thanks to Luther, that won't be the most implausible role he'll play this year. But despite this, Luther possibly represents Elba's best work to date. His character is crumpled, exhausted and beaten down by life, and this grounds the entire show with a normality that helps to offset the lunacy of the scripts.
And the lunacy of some of the other performances, for that matter. Despite the absence of Saskia Reeves's inimitable, incomparable, incomprehensible Rose Teller – a woman who appears to have gained her cockney accent after being brought up by Danny Dyer, Dick Van Dyke's character from Mary Poppins and about 50 South Africans – series two of Luther is filled with some hilariously mannered turns.
There's a policewoman straight from the school of suspicious colleagues. There's a hard-drinking mother of a prostitute. There's the prostitute herself, who can't work out which role from The Black Swan she's supposed to be ripping off. And then there's Alice, played by Ruth Wilson. It's Alice who dances closest to the precipice; a cartoonish, lip-licking, sibilant psychopath who should be laughed out of every scene she's in but manages not to be purely through the strength of Wilson's conviction.
However improbable you may find Luther, you have to admire its audacity. It represents storytelling on a scope that isn't often attempted in this country. It makes London look beautiful. And the last few minutes of tonight's episode will grab you, force you to the end of your seat, give you about 12 consecutive heart attacks and then drop you at precisely the right time. Sincerely, I'm thrilled to have it back.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/jun/14/luther-second-series