Canadian TV

In Canada: Thursdays, 9/8 pm MT, CTV
in the UK: Available on Netflix from December 19

Call me crazy, but there’s something about casting a comedian as the star of a TV show that leads you to expect it to be funny – more so, if he starts trying to tell jokes. But that’s not the case with The Indian Detective, which stars comedian Russell Peters. Peters is apparently the world’s third highest paid comedian according to Forbes, so again, you might think The Indian Detective is funny.

It’s not.

But maybe it’s not supposed to be. Certainly, co-creator Frank Spotnitz has no form for writing comedy. Bad action shows: Transporter: The Series, Hunted, Ransom. Sure. The occasionally good bit of sci-fi: The Man in the High Castle, The X-Files. Undoubtedly. But comedy? Nope.

And look at Cracker. Robbie Coltrane starred in it. Was it funny? Nope. Well, maybe sometimes.

The Indian Detective

Comedically, that’s about the size of The Indian Detective. It see Peters playing an inept Canadian beat cop. He’s so inept he’s just been demoted to a fourth-grade Constable after the drugs shipment his informant told him about turned out to be a van load of bikes.

But while he’s on suspension for a month, he gets a call from his dad, who’s moved back to Mumbai. Dad wants him to come visit and with nothing else to do, Peters takes up the opportunity. But before you know it, the lawyer who lives upstairs from dad (Mishqah Parthiephal) is asking him to help investigate the case of a client, who’s admitted to murdering a local swami but who she thinks is innocent.

And guess what – Peters turns out to be quite good at ‘detecting’. Maybe not ‘The Order of Canada’ good as his dad’s been telling everyone, but enough to solve the crime. Except it turns out there’s something deeper going involving Canadian billionaire property developer William Shatner (Star Trek, TJ Hooker – yes, I went there) that will get played out over the subsequent episodes.

Not Cracker

The Indian Detective is not Cracker by a long chalk. Think of it more as a bit of Indian tourism that shows off both the poor and rich parts of Mumbai, sometimes stereotypically, sometimes not, all married with criminal investigations that wouldn’t even tax a fourth grade Canadian police constable. There’s the occasional joke thanks to ‘flash forward’ interrogation scenes from when Peters returns to Canada that look like they’ve been lifted from Peters’ stand-up, but out of context, they feel more like character quips rather than anything expected to make you laugh hard.

Despite this being his first starring role, Peters isn’t half-bad. It’s a little surprising that he has two potential love interests, but hey ho, it’s a funny old world, innit? Parthiephal doesn’t have to do much beyond translate and offer native guidance to Mumbai, but there’s decent support from Anupam Kher (Bend It Like Beckham) as Peters’ toupee-clad dad. The Great One himself (Shatner) only appears in one scene in this episode and I wouldn’t expect that to change much until the end, as is the way of these things.

The show looks good and an Indian-set programme makes a nice change, but the first episode was a real drag and every failed attempt at a joke only made it harder to watch. Stay with it for Shatner if you must, but don’t be expecting an hilarious comedy, a top drama or the next Cracker.

In Canada: Mondays, 9pm (9:30 NT), CBC
In the UK: Will air in early 2018 on Alibi

So after three episodes, it seems that Frankie Drake Mysteries wants to be two things. Well, three things if you include “a combination of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Murdoch Mysteries“.

Set in Toronto in the roaring 20s, this Canadian-British co-production is about the city’s then only female private investigator Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith), a daring independent, liberal before her time redhead who rides motorbikes, was a spy during the War and hobnobs with the likes of Howard Carter. Drake investigates crimes with the help of her three gal pals: PI partner Chantel Riley; quasi-CSI Sharron Matthews; and cop Rebecca Liddiard. All very empowering, no?

Two ambitions

Episode 1 was a jaunty bit of fun in the style of screwball comedies and crime fiction of the time that also gave us a big chunk of Drake’s backstory. And that’s how episode three played out, too, with our heroine investigating the murdered corpse of a rival detective found in the boot of a car belonging to the son of her former spymaster. Lots of pretending to be a photographer, infiltrating country clubs, exchanging flirty quips with lazy local reporter Ernest Hemingway, revealing what she’d done in the war – all good stuff.

Yet at the same time, as well as being a bit of escapist fun for people who think that if they lived 100 years ago, they’d be hanging out with all their black friends, definitely not smoking and riding around on a motorbike in linen flapper outfits, Frankie Drake also wants to teach us a bit of history. As well as fleshing out all of Drake’s friends, episode two gave us a gander at 1920s labour relations, the burgeoning Canadian communist scene and the question of sex equality.

By the end of that episode, Drake had of course ended all sexual discrimination in Canada for all time. I think she might have passed the Female Employees Equal Pay Act through Parliament 30 years earlier than everyone thought, too, as everyone saw the injustice in not paying women the same as men for the same work. Thanks, Frankie!

All the episodes have elements of that educative quality, with Liddiard turning out to be a Morality Officer and as slavery was not too far in the past at that point, two episodes looking at the plight of black Canadians and Americans, including the French-speaking ones.

Two improvements

All of which would be very good, if the show could do two things. The first is to get the tone consistent. It’s a bit hard to go from an episode in which Drake is searching for jewel thieves who leave feathers behind as their calling card to one in which working women gang up Witness-style to prevent murders on the shop floor. It’s also a far better show when it’s being silly than when it’s trying to do hard-hitting political.

The second is to recast Frankie Drake herself. I’d really like Lee Smith to be good. I did like her in CSI, and she was about the only tolerable thing about This Life. Here, though, an entire series is supposed to revolve around her, her red-headed spunkiness and her sass. She’s supposed to be the air of 1920s spirited Suffragette confidence.

But instead, it’s like she’s having a competition to see who can say the most lines without taking a breath first. She’s less Sam Spade, more Tinkerbell – the sort of woman who pushes a motorbike around for show but never actually rides it. There’s a moment in episode 3 where she punches someone with all the force of a cupcake being tossed by a toddler and she grins as if to say, “Look at me! I’m the cleverest pixie in Tinseltown. Please love me!”

I’m really hoping she finds the spunk the script so desperately wishes she had, because although Frankie Drake isn’t a classic of the genre, it’s different enough, interesting enough and fun enough that it could be a decent bit weekly viewing. Until then, though, I’m going to sit the rest of the series out, I think.

Barrometer Rating: 3/5