(courtesy IMP Awards)
Adding a healthy dose of quirkiness to most genres usually works a treat, throwing an appealing dash of flawed humanity into the mix which helps to leaven out some of the more straight down the line elements.
In fact, properly and well used quirk has the power to draw out some hard truths that might not otherwise see the light of day, or at least makes them more noticeable and impactful, because while viewers are sitting there waiting for eccentricities and idiosyncrasies to emerge, they aren’t necessarily prepared for how dark and troubled things may get and then – BOOM! – plot point emphatically punctuated.
That happens quite a lot in Bodkin, a new seven-part series on Netflix, the trailer for which seems to promise all kinds of hilariously quirky merriment from oddball villagers to an overly optimistic American podcaster to a dour journalist who has more than a few personal issues, all of which plus quite a few others are all well and truly present and accounted for.
But a funny, or really, not so funny thing happens on the way to the big revelatory finale – and no more shall be said about that because if there’s one genre in which spoilers are damn near cataclysmically ruinous, it’s crime, even the quirky kind – and what starts out as a thrown-together trio of podcasters, one very reluctantly along for the ride, arriving in a Cork village where time seems to have stood still (that’s the impression, anyway; turns out a little wide of the mark) in the hope of finding a mystery with which to tantalise and tease listeners soon because something considerably more intense and darkly emotional.
And that is a good thing because if there’s one thing that too much quirk is in danger of doing, it’s cruelling and curdling some otherwise very fine and serious storytelling if it’s allowed to run thoughtlessly amuck.
But that never happens in Bodkin which deftly ducks and weaves and falls out of trees (well, one anyway) with narrative aplomb, dancing merrily from a quirky moment, which itself has some a darker edge to it if you’re paying attention, to points where some dark and very gritty, and actually pretty affecting dark-nights-of-the-soul, things take place that are as far from quirky as you can get.
What starts out for American podcaster Gilbert Power (Will Forte), who needs a big hit more than he’s willing to let on, his enthusiastically naïve research assistant Emmy Sizergh (Robyn Cara) and caustically prickly investigative journalist Dove Maloney (Siobhán Cullen) who’s most recent case has landed her in some regulatory hot water, as a simply checking into the mysterious disappearance of three people some twenty years at a Samhain (pron. SOW-in), a precursor of sorts to Halloween, soon becomes far, far more as all kinds of secrets are revealed.
It’s way more than these three are expecting, and while Gilbert, who arrives with the breathless excitement of many Americans to their ancestors’ homeland of Ireland all starry-eyed and bushy-tailed is thrown and near-disillusioned by what transpires, Dove is right in her element and while the consequences of playing fast and loose with a star informant in her last piece of investigative journalism has come back to aggressively haunt her, she’s thrilled by the way a seemingly unsolvable case ripe for the hinting-at-a-resolution-that-never-comes vibe of true crime podcasts, which Bodkin has a lot of fun satirising, becomes something so much more.
Trailing in Dove’s wake is Emmy who craves the kind of career Dove has, and while the two don’t exactly getting along as bosom buddies, they are more enthralled by the quirky mystery become something quite twistedly and harrowingly more than Gilbert will ever be.
While the mystery continues to warp and twist into the kinds of shapes no one saw coming, and secrets come tumbling out at a rapid rate, each of the three also end up some fearsomely personal journeys of their own.
While each of these trips into the existential deep, dark and unknown have their quirky elements and are even oddly funny at times, Bodkin isn’t afraid to really drill down into pain and loss and the grief of lives loved and pasts and futures muddied by poor decisions, both by these characters and those upon whom they depended.
It’s a gutsy blend of therapy on an epically invasive scale, Agatha Christie in modern true crime podcast mode – though we are missing an eccentric detective getting to the bottom of things but then given what takes place in the show, that might be for the best – and quirky village life, the kind that fuels many a drama, and while the tonal shifts can be quite dramatic at times, it somehow always feel like part of greater and highly enjoyable whole.
Be warned though that if you are the type of viewer who likes their stories fuelled by whiplash twists and turns and cliffhangers of the heartstopping variety, you don’t get those in Bodkin; what do you get, however, is quiet thoughtful storytelling that’s almost more concerned with rich, nuanced storytelling than it is with getting to the bottom of a feast of interlocking mysteries.
That gives this show a lovely rich and contemplative feel, and while there are some very big reveals indeed, and some edge-of-the-action sequences where tension is high and things are very much in the balance, Bodkin is content to take its own sweet time getting the mystery solved and our three main characters lives some sort of messy and incomplete resolution.
While there is a slight sense that the final episode goes a little too over-the-top and intense, and the neatly tied bows at the end are a little precisely and happily arranged for a show that was happy to keep things dark and brooding as much as quirky and edgy, Bodkin largely pulls off its masterfully immersive balancing act between three quite disparate genres – crime, serious drama and quirky comedy – and in so doing delivers a richly and just-so paced story that satisfies on quite a number of levels and which may have you checking your clothes for elvers (baby eels) for some time to come.