By Anne Brodie
Ok, so Frank Hathaway and Lu Shakespeare (Mark Benton, Jo Joyner) had a “disagreement” and broke up their two-person detective agency in Stratford-Upon-Avon after four seasons. Shakespeare and Hathaway S5 launches on BritBox Nov 25 but what to expect? After two years not speaking, and launching separate agencies, they find themselves thrown together to investigate Rina and Preston, a pair of celebrity TV home renovators. Both “couples” are spatting. Our dicks are called in when Preston is found nail gunned to death with Rina’s nail gun in the house they’ve been restoring for a very long six years. Turns out the TV stars were locked in battle over who owned the house, and who could live in it. Death threats were uttered. L and F’s former assistant Sebastien (Patrick Walshe McBride) is working secretly and separately for Frank and Lu and cooks up hilarious schemes to disguise himself in the course of this mixed endeavour. And then there’s the question of the child Rina and Preston had and gave up twenty some years earlier who suddenly shows up with a bone to pick. Will Frank and Lu bury the hatchet? Ep 1 is followed by colourful, fun cases that continue to be imaginative and make full use of the leads’ expertise crafting consistently entertaining characters. Benton’s lost a good deal of weight, and trimmed his hair and Joyner remains her amusing, brilliant self. No new trailer but here’s a peek.
I missed it first time around but the nerve-jangling missing person series Absentia from Amazon Prime is now available on Netflix, starring Stana Katic as Emily Byrne, an FBI agent gone six years and presumed dead.She’d been investigating a sadistic serial killer, also missing. But we find her – she’s beaten and submerged in a glass tank with a couple of inches of breathing space, taunted by a masked man. Happy memories of her life as a wife and mother, married to another FBI agent, keep her going. Conrad Harlow, the main suspect in her disappearance makes a late-night call to her husband directing him to the cabin where he discovers the tank. Emily’s hospitalised and has no memory of the past six years. Her husband takes the home the shares with his new wife; she is sympathetic and helps as Emily adjusts to her new old life. The FBI grills her and shares, since she’s one of them, that the perp, a florist, gave his victims the names of flowers. Her tormenter is sent to prison but not before she gives him one heck of a beatdown. This is some crazy stuff, especially when it revealed there is a copycat on the loose; she vows to bring them both down. But a bouquet of flowers arrives, and tests reveal the vase is the same water found in the tank. And then she’s arrested. See? Crazy. Also fun, ultra weird, off the rails and yet somehow riveting; you can’t believe what you’re seeing because its just too out there.