This summer has been a good time for British Television, in case you’ve missed it I’m going to go over the three best new television shows from the BBC and ITV.
At the beginning of the summer from May 4th until June 8th Luther came out. Luther is about a talented Murder Detective who isn’t very well trusted by the rest of his unit. It’s a basic formula but what makes this show so good is the title character. Luther is played by Idris Elba who you should remember as “Stringer Bell” in the Television series The Wire. The show is really well written and has some amazingly good characters, as it’s only 6 episodes, if you do have a chance of seeing it give it a chance.
Second from July to August came another police drama called Identity. This one follows the same formula as Luther almost exactly except instead of being a Murder Detective Unit, it’s an Identity Theft Unit and instead of Idris Elba from The Wire, it’s Aidan Gillen from The Wire or as he’s known in The Wire as “Tommy Carcetti, Mayor of Baltimore”. This one isn’t as good as Luther but it’s still quite good, and Gillen does a very good job.
Finally from the end of July until August comes Sherlock. This is another Sherlock Holmes show however it is created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Both of these guys you should know if you’ve been watching Doctor Who, and they actually envisioned this series while on trains going to and from Doctor Who shoots. The interesting thing about this series is instead of being six hour long episodes, it’s three two hour long episodes. The other great thing about this show is it has Martin Freeman (Tim in BBC’s The Office) who plays Holmes. The production of the show is very fun and it has the style we’ve become accustomed to in Moffat run episodes of Doctor Who. This show rivals the greatness of Luther and finishes out the three really good British series this year.
If you have a chance to catch any of these shows you should, they’re all quite excellent and are making me believe BBC and ITV have their heads on straight right now.