James Delingpole
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The series Prodigal Son most reminds me of is Mr Chuffy, the Inspector Morse pastiche (‘Any resemblance to persons living or dead will be nothing short of a miracle’) from The Armstrong & Miller Show. This concerned a Jaguar-driving alcoholic detective with a vague resemblance to John Thaw who bumbled his way to accidental solutions with the help of his imaginary friend, Chuffy, a silent, roll-up-smoking companion dressed like a 19th-century American engine driver.
To its credit, though, Prodigal Son is perfectly aware of how ludicrous it is and doesn’t take itself very seriously. In the pilot episode — spoiler alert — Malcolm realises that the only way to rescue a victim before the bomb to which he is chained goes off is to sever his arm with a hatchet. Next shot, we see Malcolm carrying an ice box, hurrying to catch up with a man clutching his bloodied stump. ‘Just got to give him a hand,’ he explains.
The star of the show is, of course, Sheen’s lovably evil dad (he has a particularly wicked grin), torn between notching up a few more vicarious kills and bonding with his absent son. Dad is in a maximum-security cell got up like a library which, somewhat implausibly, is funded by the clients who still trust him to perform his expert surgery on them while chained, Lecter-like, to the wall. He’d really rather not do good, being a serial killer and all, but the only way Malcolm will agree to see him is if he helps him get into the heads of the various mass murderers he is trying to profile and track down.
Malcolm, meanwhile, is at least halfway to thinking like a serial killer himself, these things apparently being hereditary. He can walk into the room where the bodies are and mentally reconstruct exactly what happens, a bit like when Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock does his ‘mind palace’ routine. Just in case we’ve missed the point that he has had a disturbed childhood, Malcolm has to chain himself up before he goes to sleep, suffers wild panic attacks, and deports himself a bit like that irritating, debauched, louche drug addict character on Umbrella Academy, half hyper-insouciant and fey, half ‘please will someone kill this character soon?’
Would I watch it again? Probably, if I were on my own in a hotel in somewhere like Belarus and it was the only thing in English on the box. But my suspicion is that, like a lot of popular TV, it will be one of those series where once you acquire a taste for the tone (kitsch, violent, flippant) and a fondness for the characters, you could easily get into it. Boy, I dare say, will watch it all at some time or other. But if you knew who his father was and about his terrible traumatic upbringing, you really wouldn’t judge him for this.
Because you read about detective drama
Also by James Delingpole
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