Case Histories

This is about a charismatic private eye (that’s right, private life in shreds) who takes on the cases that either the police shelved long ago, or that weren’t worth their attention. But no, contrary to expectations, this is no crime series. Each case (two one hour episodes per one wrapped up case based on a novel by Kate Atkinson) is a human drama where the melancholic nice guy Jackson Brodie comes across like some “empathetic fixer of fates". Yes, it’s very sentimental. Sometimes on the very edge of bearable, but rarely over it. Where, in other series, the focus is on crimes, investigation and perpetrators as such, here everything focuses on the characters who in regular crime series float by unnoticed. Otherwise, the fact that Brodie solves most cases by traveling the area with his daughter (how old is she, five?) until such time as someone tells him “what really happened" is quite unorthodox. All this in a dismal, rainy Edinburgh with really unusual background music. On the other hand it’s good that it focuses on other aspects than usually in this genre. And because the cases are either terribly mundane (and almost cheap in the second story), overcomplicated or laughably trivial, relying on coincidence, deus ex machina and coincidence again, this would certainly not pass as a regular crime series. Case Histories 4/5; One Good Turn 3/5; When Will There Be Good News? 3/5 (14.01.2012)