As the dark days of December continue it made me think of dark horses. Do you have a favorite book/TV show/movie that you loved that you don’t think enough people know about?
Julie: This is such a great question, and I’ll bet the readers are going to get a great list out of the Wickeds. Some of my “more people should know about this” delights of late include S.G. Wong’s Lola Starke series, a 30’s noir alternate reality mystery. Another dark horse is the Australian TV series Mr. and Mrs. Murder, which only lasted one season. The crime scene cleaners solve cases with Nick and Nora Charles banter.
Liz: Fun question, Sherry! I really have become obsessed with British crime dramas, and Broadchurch was hands down one of the best. There were three seasons, but the first one was my favorite – hard subject matter, but riveting.
Edith/Maddie: We LOVED Broadchurch, Liz. Unforgotten is another fabulous British crime series, with the amazing Nicola Walker (and Sanjeev Bhaskar) working on one cold case per season. And if folks haven’t watched Shetland yet – based on the Ann Cleeves’s novels by the same name – you should!
Jessie: I love this question too! I absolutely adore the Emma Graham novels by Martha Grimes and have yet to meet anyone else who read them. As for television, I really enjoyed the single season of Battle Creek, a cop show set in the city of the same name in which I lived as a kindergartener. I still wonder what would have happened to those characters if the show had continued.
Barb: For books that didn’t get their due, I loved Rebecca Pawel’s Carlos Tejada Investigation series, which begins with The Death of a Nationalist in 1939 in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. There are four books in the series, which ends in 1945, each taking place in a different region of Spain. For television series, I recommend Borgen, about a fictional, female Danish prime minister, which was recommended to us by Lucy Burdette and her husband. While not normally a fan of subtitles, I was all in on this one. And, I think I have finally internalized how parliamentary government works. I mean I get it intellectually, but this is a wonderful inside look. There are three seasons on Netflix with a fourth coming soon.
Sherry: I didn’t realize how much I’d be adding to my TBR and TBW list with this question. I swear every TV show I like gets canceled. I loved Timeless but there were only two seasons and a movie to wrap it up. NBC.com has episodes available. Another fun show was Take Two about a actress who played a cop on TV and then works for a PI.
Readers: How about you?