David Mitchell stars as identical twins in “Ludwig,” the latest charming quirky British detective show, coming to BritBox on Thursday. The show is a big hit in England and has already been renewed for a second season.
Mitchell is mostly playing John, the extra-fastidious twin, the one who lives a solitary life. But he has his puzzles: He makes a living as a puzzle creator known as “Ludwig” and publishes books that thrill the cryptology crowd.
He is yanked from his hermitage by a phone call from his sister-in-law, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), with whom he has been close since early childhood. His twin brother, James, a detective, is missing, and she has a kooky scheme to get to the bottom of it. John needs to pretend to be James, go to the police station and gather the intel they need. What could go wrong?
John is not a smooth operator, and he struggles with office chitchat and idiomatic language. But dang if our guy isn’t a genius observer and brilliant logician who gets to play Sherlock Holmes on cases by seeing all the ways they remind him of his games. This one is an elaborate deductive reasoning puzzle; this one is like a game of chess. You, ma’am, are under arrest.
The procedural aspects here are clever and twisty, and the serialized mystery of James’s disappearance is an ample engine. In addition to being like a fun British version of “Monk,” “Ludwig” is a stationery aficionado’s utter dream. The pens, the pencils, and oh, the notebooks. You can tell by just the sound of their snips that those scissors have the heft and excellence of God’s own shears. Appropriate for its title, the show also has a fantastic score.
SIDE QUESTS
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Mitchell is one of the team anchors in my favorite British panel show, “Would I Lie to You?” Several seasons are on Amazon Prime Video and BritBox, but you can have just as much fun looking up clips on YouTube.
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Mitchell is perhaps best known as the star of “Peep Show,” all nine seasons of which are on Amazon, Hulu, the Roku Channel and Pluto.
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In addition to “Monk” (Amazon, Peacock) and “Psych” (Amazon, Peacock), “Ludwig” reminds me a lot of “Death in Paradise,” which also centers on a fussy fish-out-of-water detective who solves nutty cases and maybe learns to soften up along the way. That’s on BritBox, as are dozens of similar shows.
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If you want to watch Maxwell Martin do more of the solving, she is one of the stars of “Bletchley Circle,” a period drama about female code crackers who solve crimes after World War II. That’s on Amazon, Peacock and the Roku Channel.
