In the opening scene of the detective show “Ludwig,” the camera pans up and down the floors of a glass office building while jaunty music plays on the soundtrack. Employees chat as they pack up and leave for the day, and then we reach an upper level, where a man in a button-down shirt and slacks is sprawled on the floor, an ornate knife sticking out of his chest.
When the comedian David Mitchell read this first page of the show’s script last year, he immediately thought, “This aesthetic is exactly what I want,” he said in a recent interview. “It just felt — which is weird to say when it involves someone being murdered — but it felt fun.”
When “Ludwig,” starring Mitchell in the lead role, aired in Britain late last year, viewers seemed to agree: Nearly 10 million people tuned in, making it the BBC’s most popular new scripted program in years.
In the show, which comes to BritBox in the United States on Thursday, Mitchell plays the kind of endearingly unworldly, fiercely intelligent character that has made him a household name in Britain.
His character, John, is a reclusive genius who lives alone, setting crosswords and other brain teasers under the pen name Ludwig. His identical twin brother, James, got married, had a son and is working as a police detective — but then James disappears, leaving his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) a cryptic note.
To find out what has happened to James, Lucy persuades John to impersonate him at the police station so he can gather clues. John may be a terrible liar with a 20-year-old cellphone, but it turns out his puzzle skills make him rather good at detective work. You just use “simple deduction and reasoning,” he tells his bemused fellow officers, after solving a murder with no apparent leads.
Mark Brotherhood, the show’s creator, said he wrote the character of John with Mitchell’s “classic dry, sardonic wit,” in mind. But he also makes some loving nods to the tradition of eccentric onscreen detectives. The show is set in the august university town of Cambridge, and bodies turn up in charming English settings like a medieval church and a sprawling country home.
“Ludwig” embraces “the picturesque joy” of the British detective genre, said Mitchell, who co-created the roommate sitcom “Peep Show” and is a regular guest on British comedy panel shows. “I’m not ashamed of watching, or being in, escapist television. I think the first duty is to entertain,” he said.
Mitchell shares this philosophy with Brotherhood, who said that, for him, “nothing hurts a show more than any form of politics,” especially at a time when “people are tired of the heavy, heavy stuff they have to read about all day.”
In an uncertain time, a detective show can offer some consolation, Brotherhood said. A terrible crime happens, and “we can fix the world, we can make that problem go away again, by solving it,” he said.
In “Ludwig,” John takes refuge from the complicated outside world by immersing himself in puzzles — a neat mirroring of the escapism the show’s creators hope to provide viewers. There is a new crime to solve at the police station in each of the show’s six hourlong episodes, while John and Lucy make progress investigating what happened to James and burrow into the case he was working on before he disappeared.
Lucy has known the twin brothers since she was 6, and growing up, she and John were best friends. But then she married his twin, and there is both familiarity and poignancy in their renewed closeness. The opportunity to explore this longstanding friendship drew Maxwell Martin to the role of Lucy, she said recently by phone. “For me, it’s not a detective show,” she added, “it’s a show about Lucy’s relationship with John.”
Maxwell Martin, who starred in the hit BBC police drama “Line of Duty,” said she was also attracted to “Ludwig” because she could see it had broad appeal. There aren’t many good, scripted shows you can watch with your kids, she said, adding: “I don’t want to be in shows about girls being killed. I’m really over it.”
Lucy is the plot’s driving force, tenacious and “perpetually positive,” according to Maxwell Martin. (“I’m like that,” she added.) Something of a cheerful rebel, Lucy’s playfulness often contrasts with how John approaches new situations: with much trepidation.
Although Mitchell has chosen a career in front of the camera, and the reclusive John is only known to the world by his pen name, “I do get where he’s coming from,” the comedian said. “I can feel the shyness, the feeling on a certain day that you don’t want to leave the house.”
The show’s much-anticipated second season is planned to start filming later this year, and John would probably recognize some of the trepidation that Mitchell said he was feeling. After the success of the first season, he said, “I’m just tipping into worrying that we’ll mess this up.”
