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Detective work involves an element of play – uncovering hidden information, recognising patterns, collecting evidence and making “eureka!” discoveries. Many famous fictional detectives were masters of games and puzzles. Inspector Morse was an avid crossword puzzler; Lord Peter Wimsey was a code breaker. Hercule Poirot, that shrewd know-it-all, solved a chess-related murder by carefully analysing Ruy Lopez’s opening and the unusual use of a white bishop. (The segment was electrified.) Part of the fun of reading detective stories and watching them on screen is the thrill of play – with the investigation and the tantalising idea that human misdeeds can be fully understood. It’s a concept that seems particularly enticing today. It’s a good time, in other words, for British mystery comedy Ludwig, which debuts on BritBox this week, where mysteries become actual puzzles, solved by a genius creator of crosswords and cryptograms. Written and created by Mark Brotherhood, Ludwig has been a hit in the UK and has been renewed for a second season. It stars David Mitchell, who is a master at portraying the lovable but awkward everyman type – someone whose heated musings, however clever, bring few social rewards. Here, Mitchell plays a grizzled, withdrawn homebody who would rather solve puzzles than socialise, and suddenly finds himself having to cope with both. Viewers emerging from the age of remote working may recognise themselves in him. But unlike most of us, Ludwig turns out to be a genuine genius. “Two notches up, actually,” he says at one point. “But I find that it never helps when it comes to… chatter.”
Mitchell has long been a comedy duo with Robert Webb; Americans familiar with memes will recognize “Are We the Bad Guys?” from their show “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” in which two SS officers fret about the turtles on their uniforms. The crudely brilliant “Peep Show,” created by Jesse Armstrong (“Succession”), featured them as an odd pair of hapless flatmates, Mitchell the prim intellectual, Webb the carefree fool. (“She knows about elbows, she’s uncomfortable in her own skin—she’s one of me!” Mitchell’s flustered character thinks of an attractive shoe-store clerk.) In “Ludwig,” Mitchell is in a kind of comedy duo with himself. He primarily plays John Taylor, a man with an identical twin, James. But John has another doppelganger: known to fans as Ludwig. (The opening scene features the notes of Für Elise, and Beethoven motifs resonate throughout the film.) He spends his days alone in his late parents’ home, happily working among easels, a shelf filled with Ludwig’s tomes—cryptograms, logic puzzles, crosswords, math problems, codes—and family photographs, with Mitchell in two. As the story begins, James goes missing, and his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) begs John to help him find him by posing as him. Ouch! It’s not easy to get a hermit to leave his home, but these are strange times, and he decides to do so.
The puzzles come thick and fast. James, a police detective, has disappeared after strange events at work, leaving behind a cryptic letter containing secret messages that John helps decipher. James has hidden a secret notebook at the police station, and it’s up to John to find it. He reluctantly poses as James and immediately finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation: a top lawyer has been stabbed to death with an antique letter opener! And off we go. John’s biggest challenge is how to act like a confident family man, unflappable in the face of the outside world. The comedic possibilities of social awkwardness have been thoroughly explored in both British and American entertainment in recent decades, but Mitchell is particularly good at it, and the way it plays out in Ludwig feels fresh. The series successfully blends comedy, drama and detective procedural, and the awkwardness isn’t just for fun. In one of the first scenes, John is so confused by what's going on among the suspects and officers at the crime scene that he runs outside and calls Lucy. “I can't do this, Lucy!” he says, breathing heavily. “I don't know how anyone can… I'm talking about all this, I'm talking about just getting up in the morning and leaving the house – coming out here, to all this! The crowds, the noise, the buildings, the offices, the computers and the people! Nobody can see each other, and everyone's talking at once! Alarm clocks going off, phones ringing, everyone moving, up and down, in and out, and there's no order to it, no structure, no purpose!” They
Sourse: newyorker.com
