Please, we’re begging, make this Patrick Stewart/Ian McKellen gardening detective show a reality
Aux Features patrick stewart
Here’s the deal. We have some context to add to this idea, and you’ll find it further down the page. But really, the aim of this article is simple. In the grand tradition of the Lupita Nyong’o/Rihanna heist movie (which we’re really hoping is still happening?) we are simply attempting to signal-boost a very good idea for a proposed entertainment, as found on Twitter.
This time, the source is not a fun caption on a publicity still, but a whole vibe from fantasy novelist M.L. Brennan.
Honestly, that’s enough, we’re sold. But Brennan kept going, and seriously, has HBO reached out yet?
Perfect, honestly. We would watch the hell out of that.
“JUST DRIVE, LEWIS!”
Ah yes, the old biscuit ploy.
There’s no universe in which Henry Cavill doesn’t say yes to this. That’s his new schedule, once we’re done sheltering-in-place: The Witcher, some spy movies, and tackling that man who stole the pills.
And then there’s this excellent point. Make Imelda Staunton a murderer! Cush Jumbo is a local café owner! Hugh Grant could basically play the exact same role he played in Paddington 2 and run a community theater!
It’s worth reading further down the thread for suggestions submitted by others. Our favorite:
The curious thing (here’s the context) is that this series actually taps into the kind of energy that Star Trek: Picard showrunner Michael Chabon said he wanted to capture for the show in early drafts. This is from an interview with Variety, published this week to coincide with the show’s first-season finale:
You know, personally speaking, my own tastes and inclination, I always said when we were in the earliest versions of the room for this show, if we could have just done a whole show about Picard and the dog on the vineyard in France, with no starships, no phasers, the only Romulans would be those two Romulans who work for him on the vineyard, and no politics — just, like, there’s a funfair down in the village and they all go, and maybe Picard solves a very low stakes mystery in the village, like, someone has stolen the antique bell out of the bell tower, or something like that? I would have loved to write that show. Um. I don’t think the world’s quite ready for a Star Trek show like that, and there’s probably maybe not that big of an audience for a Star Trek show like that.
Mr. Chabon may be right, but the response to Brennan’s Twitter thread sure seems to indicate that there’s at least some audience for a show like that. When the Lupita/Rihanna idea took off, it promptly got the attention of director Ava DuVernay and writer Issa Rae, so we’re putting it out there. Please, for the love of god, when all this is over, someone make this show.
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The British have had a gardening detective show along these lines to a degree (of course they did).https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_%26_Thyme
I actually have a soft spot for this deeply silly show.
Yeah, you’d think eventually people would stop hiring these gardeners once they realized literally all of their previous landscaping gigs happened to involve murders.
The first episode of Rosemary and Thyme entered our family lexicon decades ago; there’s a line towards the end where one of the impossibly posh murderers shouts “GET THEM, MUMMY!” and for some reason it’s just ended up being a catchphrase of ours, although I’m really not sure what situations it’s actually applicable in.All cosy murder mystery shows are wonderful.
I’ve always marveled at how regularly people get murdered in sleepy little villages in the British countryside. And at how bad the local constabulary is at solving them. It always falls on the local busybody/mystery writer/gardener/parish priest to solve them.
It’s long been posited that Miss Marple is the most prolific serial killer of all time, succeeding through her successful framing of whomever happens to be around.
Not Jessica Fletcher?
She’s Miss Marple’s granddaughter who carried on the family tradition of serial killing after 60.
Fun fact I just learned, the part of Jessica Fletcher was originally offered to Jean Stapleton (aka Edith Bunker).
I could see her being great in that role!
I know she wasn’t purely Edith, but I also can’t help but imagine her doing Edith Bunker as Jessica Fletcher with her warbly voice. “Oh dear, I think maybe it’s possible the boy over there did the cwiime.”
It was always wild seeing her in other roles and NOT sounding like Edith. Her normal speaking voice was actually in a lower range, much like Angela Lansbury’s.I think her great success in creating such a memorable character in Edith Bunker played against her later in her career. She got so tired of playing the role she asked for Edith to be killed off in Archie Bunker’s Place.
She’s probably a close second.
That could be a great premise for a series ala Arsenic and Old Lace—the sweet little old lady at the end of the lane poisoning out-of-towners with a mix of wine, arsenic, strychnine, and a just a pinch of cyanide.When the police discover the bodies in the fields just outside town (after her prize-winning rose garden can no longer handle the corpse load), she offers her services to help “solve” the crime, often pinning it on a hapless tourist or a hiker found staying overnight in one of the local bothies.Whenever one of the coppers gets a little too inquisitive, he meets with an unfortunate “accident,” or gets caught up in a scandal and London has to send a replacement.
In the meantime, anyone looking for a quaint British gardening buddy murder mystery who hasn’t watched Rosemary and Thyme yet – do yourselves a friggin’ favor.
If we can’t get Cavill, another good choice would be Joe Absolom, Al Large in Doc Martin. After nine seasons of playing the sane son of the ever scheming Bert Large, Absolom has the exasperated attitude of young people having to clean up other people’s messes down pat.And since we only got a couple of seasons of Vicious, we deserve Derek Jacobi occasionally showing up as a member of the village council to mediate the inevitable disputes Ian and Patrick will have concerning their respective gardens. Any two of them on the same stage are funny, all three would be a geriatric laugh riot!
Just have an entire season of Midsomer Murders where Inspector Barnaby deputizes Sir Ian and Sir Patrick for shits and giggles.
no, fuck that. we need to get arnold to do a mcbain movie before he gets any older.
He’s been so successful for so long, it’s easy to only think of Sir Ian as an elder statesman of the stage. This is him at 22 or 23 years old in End of Conflict:Of course, Sir Patrick was young once too. Here he is at roughly the same age:
And, of course, they’ve been in too many Shakespeare productions to count, Here’s Sir Patrick as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Sir Ian as Coriolanus in Coriolanus (AKA The Anus Play).
Stewart was 47 when ST:TNG debuted, making everyone think he was so much older than he really was. Then he made that work in his favor by barely seeming to age since then.
So true. And he and McKellen primarily spent their early careers on stage. Stewart did the occasional miniseries, but he wasn’t usually the lead. I think the biggest television role he had prior to TNG was as Sejanus in I, Claudius—which was basically a filmed stage production.
I mean, minus the mystery-of-the-week aspect this is already a fairly close match to Vicious, and frankly Vicious would have been greatly improved by being a mystery-of-the-week show rather than a weird attempt to bring back the single-camera laugh track sitcom.