2017-2018 mystery show, 11 episodes. In 1920s Toronto, Frankie Drake,
former Signals rider, and her partner Trudy Clarke, are the city's
first female private detectives.
The programme gets its inspiration from other two shows I haven't
seen (though I may watch them at some point): Murdoch Mysteries
donates the idea of television honestly set in Toronto, and many of
the cast and crew, while Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries gives the
female protagonist in a fairly-historical 1920s setting (even if it is
on the other side of the world): the shadow of the Great War still
affects society, and people worry about anarchists and alcohol
smugglers.
This is clearly a female-led show, with all the principals and most of
the recurring characters (as well as the showrunners and about half
the writers and directors) being women. Strangely (if you're used to
shows where being "the woman" is a character type in itself), there's
no difficulty in distinguishing them by appearance or personality.
While one can sometimes see where corners have been cut in terms of
location choices, production values are high, and the set decorators
and clothing designers have done a great job of getting across a feel
of Toronto in the 1920s, a city that was growing fast but still in the
shadow of Montréal. Naturally, modern Toronto has a large pool of
available TV actors, and while there are some familiar faces I didn't
recognise most of them.
One of the real strengths of this show is its plotting, which uses
real concerns and events of the period as the basis for its stories: a
factory owner hires the detectives to root out communist agitators,
bootleggers' fights spill over into other people's lives, the missing
Princess Anastasia turns up (or does she?), and a famous aviator and
proponent of eugenics has his baby kidnapped; and all of this plays
out against a backdrop of changing roles for women. It's very much the
sort of thing I try to do myself when running games set in the real
world: after all, if you aren't going to use these contemporary
issues, why not just set it in the modern day?
All right, sometimes the Message is a bit heavy-handed, but if we have
to have this stuff on TV at least it's a message that authority is
often too ready to believe the convenient answer, rather than that The
Police Are Always Right and white men ditto. Everyone here seems to be
having a good time, and there's a welcome sense of lightness which is
missing from many shows about criminal investigation.
A second season is expected shortly.
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