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    ‘Art Detectives’ Is Good Nerdy Fun

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    Murder? Of course. But this British series also gets excited about things like Viking gold, Chinese artifacts and Dutch master paintings.“Art Detectives,” on Acorn TV, is another strong cozy-nerdy procedural, this time oriented around murders connected to arts and culture. Stephen Moyer stars as Detective Inspector Mick Palmer, the sole member of the Heritage Crime Unit and a knowledgeable, passionate, observant dork. In the pilot, he recruits a devoted underling, Detective Constable Shazia Malik (Nina Singh), a young cop whose potential he spots and whose shabby boss he abhors.Each episode opens with a jazzy little murder vignette, and then Palmer and Malik show up to educate us all about Viking gold or Chinese artifacts. Given that Palmer is an art cop, perhaps it is no surprise that his dad (Larry Lamb) is an art criminal — a forger in particular, and also a real absentee dirtbag. Their relationship and Palmer’s grief and abandonment issues form the serial story line of the show.But the fun here is in the episodic aspects, and “Art Detectives” has a good time in the worlds of, for example, wine fraud and Titanic collectibles. Most of the mysteries here include one more minor twist at the end, an additional motive for the murder that the detectives misunderstood or a connection between the suspects that they missed. This helps the show feel more special than just another chug-along “Murder, She Wrote” descendant, a little richer, a little more adorned. The show is conscious of its own predictability, so it makes the most of its surprises.Many detective shows center on an investigator who is so dang quirky that his or her quirk is the defining feature of the show. But “Art Detectives” is a little brighter and realer than that. Palmer is not some alienated, frigid genius, nor is Malik his trusty people-whisperer. Palmer is an occasionally awkward smart guy who loves art and history. He flirts with his curator romantic interest (Sarah Alexander) over 1,000-year-old Viking skeletons and impresses collectors with his knowledge of rare books. For a while there, a lot of cop shows were horny for murder; “Art Detectives” prefers culture. Ooo, talk Dutch masters to me.Four of the season’s six episodes are available now, with new installments arriving on Mondays. More

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      New Horror TV Shows to Stream This Halloween: ‘Teacup,’ ‘Uzumaki’ and More

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      This year’s horror series take us to damned villages, cursed towns and countries fallen into anarchy.This selection of shows from October’s annual parade of horror series will take you on a tour of places where the world appears to be out of control: a South Korea going through a religious frenzy, a Georgia farm under attack, a bucolic English village visited by aliens, a Japanese seaside town haunted by spirals. Just keep telling yourself it’s fiction.‘Hellbound’Based on an online cartoon, this Korean series on Netflix has a comic-book hook, repeated a time or two per episode: A trio of towering, golem-like figures materialize, heralded by cracks of thunder, and roast a human who has been identified as a sinner. This usually involves a lot of smashing and tossing about of people and vehicles. These scenes are kinetically satisfying — it is a Korean production, after all — and there’s something counter-intuitively adorable about the silent, hulking reapers. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho of the “Train to Busan” zombie films, “Hellbound,” whose second season premiered last week, is a solidly constructed supernatural thriller, with well-choreographed action that often features a tight-lipped lawyer (Kim Hyun-joo) who gets more use out of her police baton than her legal training.The bam-pow does not dominate the show, however. The screenwriter Choi Gyu-seok, adapting Yeon’s 2002 webtoon, focuses less on explaining the supernatural happenings than on portraying a society’s reactions to a terrifying rip in reality. Those responses are bad and badder, running from coercive religious fanaticism to cathartic, mordant anarchy — parallels to current trends around the world are almost certainly intentional — while a few contrarians fight for rationality and free will.The drama of ideas is talky and pitched between comic book and Philosophy 101, but there is enough inventiveness and feeling in the storytelling to keep you attuned to the show’s evocation of a world quickly going mad.‘The Midwich Cuckoos: Village of the Damned’When this mini-series premiered in Britain two years ago, it had the same title as the John Wyndham novel on which it is loosely based, “The Midwich Cuckoos.” For its American release, Acorn TV and Sundance Now (both will have the third of seven episodes on Thursday) tacked on the name of the cult-favorite 1960 film adaptation, “Village of the Damned.” The series is a solid, watchable piece of work, though it might have been better if they hadn’t reminded us of the chilling, compact, highly satisfying movie.The story, if you are unfamiliar, begins with everyone in a British village blacking out; shortly after, every woman of childbearing age finds herself pregnant. The resulting children, as you might guess, are a scary bunch, with powers of mind control that represent an extinction-level threat. “The Midwich Cuckoos” handles the science-fiction aspects capably, and like the film, it has its share of quietly creepy moments. Filling out the expanded running time with a lot of agonizing about motherhood and parenting, though, feels a little precious when the story is about aliens getting Earth women pregnant. Focus!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Happy Valley’ Review: The End of the Hero’s Journey

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      Sarah Lancashire returns in the long-delayed final season of one of the best, and most human, crime dramas on TV.Each season of the great British series “Happy Valley” begins the same way, with the rock-solid cop Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) facing the everyday bizarrerie of policing in a tired, depressed, grimly beautiful pocket of West Yorkshire: teenage sheep rustlers, a jilted boyfriend threatening to set himself on fire, unseen agitators heaving kitchen appliances out of upper-story windows onto patrol cars. Compassionate but impatient and prone to anger, smarter than the detectives who condescend to her, Cawood wears her black uniform and neon vest like a bulky suit of armor. She’s a contemporary knight errant, upholding a code of decency against the terrors of modern life.“Happy Valley,” whose final season premieres on Monday (streaming on Acorn TV and AMC+, broadcast on BBC America), is a pocket-size, prosaic saga — a hero’s tale contained in three six-episode seasons and embedded in a family drama. The emotions that buffet the characters are epic in scale, but the action, though it has occasional flashes of brutal violence, tends to be of the everyday, walking-and-talking variety. Like all mythical heroes, Cawood has an antagonist, the psychopathic rapist and killer Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), who is the father of her grandson. But for long stretches of the show, he is in prison, and he and Cawood spend much more time stewing about each other than actually facing off.The second season was shown in 2016, and that seven-year gap is reflected onscreen. Season 3 begins with Cawood counting the days to her retirement and enjoying atypically peaceful relations with her sister, the recovering alcoholic Clare (Siobhan Finneran), and with her now teenage grandson, Ryan (Rhys Connah). The center quickly fails to hold, however, as both the emergence of a body in a drained reservoir and Cawood’s discovery of a profound betrayal by someone close to her raise the specter of Royce, even though he is in prison for life.In its structure, “Happy Valley” is very much a traditional British crime series, with seemingly unconnected plot strands and investigations that wind themselves together against a backdrop of cop-shop politics. But in the hands of the accomplished writer and producer Sally Wainwright (“Gentleman Jack,” “Scott & Bailey), who has written every episode, it is also a powerful social drama that focuses unflinchingly on male violence against women without sliding into speechmaking or heavy-handed symbolism. In the new season’s major subplot, a less-than-sympathetic female character is caught between two seemingly more capable men whose weaknesses run deeper than hers.Overall, the final season is, as any faithful viewer could guess, the culmination of Cawood’s extended battle to the (at least figurative) death with Royce. In order to set up a satisfyingly visceral conclusion, Wainwright forces the action and pushes at plausibility a little harder than those viewers will be used to. The story’s focus also is diluted by her indulgence of characters from the first two seasons who are brought back but not given much to do.Those offenses are minor, though. And the mechanics of the plot fade in the face of the prodigious performances by Lancashire and Norton, both of whom calmly straddle the allegorical and the mundane: the stoic warrior who is a grouchy grandmother, the indestructible horror-movie monster who is a sad victim of his own sociopathy. Also wonderful to watch are Finneran — the relationship between Cawood, for whom weakness is anathema, and the softhearted Clare has been the show’s backbone — and Connah; a child of 10 when the previous season was filmed, he is excellent as the now nearly adult Ryan.Cawood’s mission in the final season has a new, even more personal dimension: She must protect Ryan from his father while also, grudgingly and tardily, acknowledging Ryan’s right to learn about the man for himself. In a time when television and film are playing catch-up with female superheros and action figures, “Happy Valley” has quietly provided a paradigm of local, human heroism. More

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      Three (White, Male) Tough Guys Sign Off. Is It a Moment?

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      “Bosch,” “Mr. Inbetween” and “Jack Irish,” dependably good and noticeably old-fashioned, all reach the end of the hard-boiled road.Biologists trace changes in the environment through die-offs: a lake of belly-up fish or a sudden drop in the honey bee population. The television ecosphere is less conducive to scientific analysis — the recent arrival of the final episodes of “Bosch,” “Mr. Inbetween” and “Jack Irish” within just over a month could be coincidental. On the other hand, it could be a sign that the climate has become less hospitable to hard-boiled crime dramas with middle-aged white male heroes. More