TV: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

If you happened to see my recent book post about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you might know that I'm a big fan of the works of Douglas Adams. For a while, I'd heard good things about the new US adaptation of his book about about... well, what is Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency about? It's a sort of communally made quilt of interconnected oddness. A quirky detective is holistically connected to everything, so he kinda just goes where he needs to go on some kind of instinctual level that looks like fate, and that core concept is explored in a lot of interesting ways.

And yes, reading the book as a teenager did teach me the word holistic. Every time I see/hear/read that word, I think about this.

Back to the show, though - I'd heard good things about it. People who had watched it seemed to universally be fond of it and attach themselves to it like cultural barnacles, so I thought I'd better check it out, and then I immediately became a barnacle myself.

Elijah Wood is great as our hapless and somewhat desperate main (or almost main, not sure there really is a main) character, who really wants things to just be normal but is pretty powerless to do anything but trundle along in Dirk Gently's wake. All of the actors in this show give great performances, actually, and that stands out well in a show where the characters are so important.

All the strangeness of the plot needs strong, believable, funny, yet also emotive characters to rest on. Watching each new face and scenario is a real treat, and each new scene seems to bring another scintillating element - whether a piece of the narrative, an introduction, a joke, everything is so well crafted and well paced here.

It means a lot to me to find shows with particular tone and compassion to them, and especially in a sea of media that can often leave a bitter feeling in the chest or just feel unsatisfyingly distant from reality, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency's unique sense of wonder, humour, and character makes it a brilliantly enriching experience.

I love it.