'VEXED' 1.3

Here's my problem with Vexed in a nutshell: it wants to have a compelling will-they-won't-they flavour amid the sleuthing, but Jack (Toby Stephens) and Kate (Lucy Punch) have no real chemistry, and Jack's such a massive prick that you're hoping he gets transferred somewhere far away. Sure, ginger cheeseball Jack's preferable to Kate's loathsome hubbie Dan (Rory Kinnear), but that's not a good enough reason to want to see Jack and Kate become an item... and that's a major flaw for a series aiming for a Moonlighting-esque romance.

The final part of this mercifully brief series was an improvement over the inept second episode, but not quite as strong as the mediocre premiere. The investigation revolved around the disappearance of Gemma G (Scarlett Rose Patterson), lead singer of girl group "Candy Crew", who has apparently been kidnapped for ransom. Suspicion fell on known "super-fan" John-Paul (Dylan Brown), who was struck off the list of suspects because he's in a wheelchair, as everyone at home contemplated the obvious "twist" that the group's manager Richard (Del Synnott) has staged Gemma's abduction for the free publicity. Fortunately, Jack made the same deductive leap shortly after everyone at home, and the script appeared to end that clichéd line of enquiry. However, just when you thought the story was now free to move into unpredictable realms, it instead reversed to reveal how disabled John-Paul was indeed the culprit, coerced by Candy Crew's manager into keeping Gemma G for longer than planned to boost record sales (the latter part of his plan inspired by Jack's initially mistaken theory).

But is anyone watching Vexed for its plots? They barely fill the hour and neither victim or perpetrator are of any concern. The show is more interested in giving Jack and Kate various situations to handle during their investigation, but nine of that's as much fun as it should be. They're just not funny characters -- individually, or together. Stephens has misjudged the tone completely and made Jack into an exasperating, incompetent twerp. Punch is more likeable, but her "blonde Katherine Parkinson" shtick wears thin and her character's so wet it's hard to care about her.

It's hard to see what Howard Overman was doing with Vexed, which has one of TV's most well-trodden premises (mismatched detectives who would be perfect as lovers, but don't realize it), and failed to put an interesting slant on it. It's not very funny, it's not very dramatic, it falls between two stools and can't get up. There are sporadic moments where you titter over a sight gag or a phrase, but the show builds such a thick atmosphere of tedium that you're just not in the mood to laugh. The only thing that grabbed my interest was seeing Lucy Punch sprint around the woods in some tiny lycra running shorts, hate to say it.

Overall, I can't imagine Vexed being re-commissioned by the BBC (not least because the production company Greenlit has gone into administration). It felt like it was thrown into the summer schedule because the BBC knew they had a turkey on their hands, and despite the fact I like the actors and writer's previous work, none of it gelled on-screen. It really was a limp, disappointing detective series, and I don't think too many people will care if this is the last we see of it.

WRITER: Howard Overman
DIRECTOR: Matt Lipsey
GUEST CAST: Rory Kinnear, Roger Griffiths, Ronny Jhutti, Del Synnott, Dylan Brown, Marcy Oni, Jayne Wisener, Jenny Jules, Scarlett Rose Patterson, Jumayn Hunter & Tony Gardner
TRANSMISSION: 29 August 2010 - BBC2/HD, 9PM

moreless

'VEXED' 1.2

Whatever glints of promise that caught my eye last week vanished during Vexed's second hour, as its uninspired premise and unlikable leads rapidly overwhelmed an already tedious storyline. The characters and situations are too underwritten to be very dramatic, while the jokes are too obvious or feeble to be funny. This has quickly become the summer's biggest letdown for me, as an admirer of Howard Overman's work on Merlin and Misifts.

This week, Jack (Toby Stephens) and Kate (Lucy Punch) were called to an idyllic rehab clinic to investigate a car bombing intended for a depressed banker. There followed an hour of limp shenanigans with the two mismatched detectives, poking fun at mental illness, and nothing about it worked for me. The police response to the threat of a killer stalking a rehab clinic was ludicrous from beginning to end. Why are only Jack and Kate on this case, sans uniformed backup, and having to guard the target's bedroom on nightly shifts themselves? Why isn't the banker put into protective custody, away from the scene? Why don't Jack and Kate at least interview all the patients and staff?

Crazily, a major breakthrough came courtesy of the café owner they're always visiting -- a black character who now has two "funny" strings to his bow: to continually feign outrage at Kate's accidental "racism" toward him, and to handily reveal he's a bomb expert who infiltrated the IRA because, well, someone has to push the plot along with some professional insights. Kate and Jack are so inept it's actually infuriating seeing them at work, no matter how jokily the script treated the seriousness of the threat here. It's a show that can't resist playing loud pop music over unfunny sight gags like Jack helping paramedics lift a fat dead patient onto a stretcher.

One key problem is that the balance of comedy and drama seesaws from one extreme to the other. There was a scene with Kate and her injured husband Dan (Rory Kinnear) receiving marriage guidance counseling that was performed with surprising rawness by both. In fact, there was such a lack of humour to the scene that it felt utterly misplaced. The tone just isn't right. And moments after you've been slapped by an incongruously somber moment that reduces Kate to tears, you soon find yourself watching a scene where juvenile Jack throws a rock into a nearby bush and -- wouldn't you know it! -- bonks someone on the head who was sat behind it. I think I've seen the same joke before, on Chucklevision.

Toby Stephens is putting the effort in, but Jack's not the hilariously unorthodox and womanizing rogue I think he's supposed to be. He's just a childish, smarmy idiot whose ennui with each week's case is more uncomfortable than amusing to watch. You have no faith that Jack's slacker attitude and outrageous behaviour (he hired a man with OCD to be his cleaner) will ultimately crack the case. He may have Columbo's taste in coats, but that's as far as his detective skills go. I barely trust the more responsible Kate, either, as she's too distracted by her deteriorating marriage and trying to keep her petulant partner under control.

Overall, episode 2 of Vexed was a failure in nearly every respect -- save for a few moments that inspired a thin chuckle, like Jack mistaking a plump window cleaner as an obsessive-compulsive patient with an eating disorder. This week's mystery didn't provide any nourishment for armchair sleuths, as the perpetrator's identity was obvious the moment the actor appeared (the faintly recognizable character actor whose appearance screamed "creepy killer"), and the simple pace of last week's storyline was absent. The story dragged, the jokes flopped, the leads aren't likable, the chemistry is non-existent, the premise isn't clever, the mystery was halfhearted, the culprit was obvious, and the drama was listless.

WRITER: Howard Overman
DIRECTOR: Matt Lipsey
GUEST CAST: Roger Griffiths, Rory Kinnear, Ronny Jhutti, Kevin Doyle, Amanda Douge, Robin Pearce, Jonathan Slinger, Richard Cant, Ashley Artus, Hannah Stokely & Dan Tetsell
TRANSMISSION: 22 August 2010 - BBC2/HD, 9PM

moreless

'VEXED' 1.1

I had high hopes for this comedy-drama about two mismatched private eyes, mainly because it comes from writer Howard Overman, whose work on E4's Misfits turned a seemingly trivial delinquent riff on Heroes into a BAFTA-winning hit. I was hoping some of that magic would rub off on the less fantastical concerns of a lighthearted detective series. Sadly, while Vexed did have its moments, it was more miss than hit...

As befits his name, ex-cop Jack Armstrong (Toby Stephens) is a fortysomething jack-the-lad and one half of a detective partnership with forthright Kate Bishop (Lucy Punch), where they're given inexplicable access to crime scenes. Vexed doesn't explain why Jack and Kate are given so much investiture and appear to be the sole investigators of serious crimes the police should be leading. From a storytelling standpoint I can understand this decision (it avoids dull procedure and formula that involving police always entails), but it is noticeably silly. I guess it's just something you have to just swallow and accept.

Jack and Kate are essentially two regular people able to indulge their love of a good "whodunnit?" in the real world, with a little inside help from a forensic analyst (Ronny Jhutti), operating from a café adjacent to the police station. But while they're professionals in the sense they get paid for their efforts (well, assumedly -- it's not clear who hired them!), both carry the scent of two unconventional middle-class hobbyists. Kate is the more committed and proficient one (balancing her unusual job with the duties of a loving wife), whereas the distractible Jack often uses perks of the job to chase skirt.

Both don't seem particularly worried they're dealing with a serial-killer in this opening episode, either -- a predator who kills single women after wooing them by faking commonality in their lifestyles (using access to their supermarket loyalty card's data). Now, it's not essential in a blithe murder-mystery that the detectives grapple with the torment of chasing cold-blooded murderers, because plenty of shows have diluted homicide for armchair thrills (Monk, Murder, She Wrote, Midsomer Murders, etc), but somehow Vexed troubled me. I think it was because neither Jack or Kate appear to be particularly skilled, really, so there isn't a subconscious assurance that these barmy duo aren't actually hindrances that get lucky.

The casting raises its own concerns. Lucy Punch is likable, cute, and plays the stable half of the partnership quite well, although there's not much depth to Kate yet. Toby Stephens gets to play the crazier half of this double-act and, while I've enjoyed the actor's dramatic roles and his comedic Robin Hood guest-appearances were side-splitting, he doesn't get the balance right here. Jack was too broadly comical, to the detriment of believing he's even interesting in solving cases. Some of that was intentional (Jack essentially used the killer's modus operandi to get into the knickers of a woman he met in a supermarket!), but Jack often looked too distracted and indifferent about the case in hand. Sometimes it was like watching Stephens doing a Hugh Grant impression in a rom-com -- which was admittedly quite entertaining at times, because it involved more emotional content, but that's not the show Vexed is billed as.

Both character aren't interesting to me yet, but they're not beyond salvage. The bigger complaint is that, together, Punch and Stephens don't appear to have much chemistry. They're not lovers on the show, but there's clearly meant to be a "will-they/won't-they" aspect to their partnership, and at the very least they should spark off each other like close friends or squabbling siblings would. The only scene that really sold their playful bond was a funny moment with Kate causing Jack intentional pain by tapping on a hidden mic to cause havoc with his listening earpiece, and they weren't physically together for that scene!

Overall, Vexed does show some promise, and the leads are capable actors who perhaps need time to find the nuances to their characters and develop a rapport. Overman's script was sporadically witty, fast-paced throughout, and the mystery was solved nicely (I didn't guess the culprit, which is of prime importance for this genre), but it wasn't very funny and the content felt stretched by 20-minutes. The fact there are only three hour-long episodes means there probably won't be time for Overman to rethink or polish certain areas, or for the actors to totally bed-in with their roles, which is a shame. There's a great opportunity for an amusing dose of Sunday night sleuthing the family can enjoy, but Vexed just left me feeling... well, slightly vexed.

WRITER: Howard Overman
DIRECTOR: Matt Lipsey
CAST: Lucy Punch, Toby Stephens, Roger Griffiths, Ronny Jhutti, Rory Kinnear, Naomi Bentley, Nicholas Tizzard, Sian Brooke, Peter Moreton, Peter Bramhill, Katharine Burford, Alton Letto & Daniella Dessa
TRANSMISSION: 15 August 2010 - BBC2/HD, 9PM

Update: As has been pointed out in comments below, the characters are actually plainclothes police detectives and introduced themselves as such. My apologies, but that fact escaped my attention for a number of reasons while watching the episode.

moreless