Rating: 2 stars out of 5
Starring: David Tennant, Stanley Tucci
Where to watch: Netflix
Seasons and episodes: 1 season, 4 episodes, 1 hour per episode
To watch or not to watch: Please skip this despite the stellar cast

The series opens with Jefferson Grieff (Stanley Tucci) in a prison cell helping someone solve a murder. He is a former American law professor convicted of murdering his wife, to which he confessed and is haunted by his act. In the parallel, there is Harry Watling (David Tennant) who is a vicar in a small town in England. He has a troubled parishioner Edgar who lives with his verbally abusive mother. Edgar hands a memory stick to Harry to safe keep, away from his mother. Harry picks up his son’s maths tutor Janice Fife (Dolly Wells), reaches home and deposits his keys and memory stick in a bowl at the entrance. Harry’s son Ben (Louis Oliver) gives the stick to Janice to transfer some material. Janice pokes her nose into what is stored on the drive to find child p*rn, and thinks Harry is a pedophile. This leads to a lot of misunderstandings, and a comedy of errors.

If they had made the series into a real comedy instead of whatever it was, it would have gone down better with the audience. From the opening scene with Tucci’s Hannibal-esque Grieff acting as a consultant because somehow he is a criminal mastermind to the taking of memory stick home, when it was equally safe in the church is farcical. Ben tries to save his father by declaring ownership of the offending memory stick, but the father is digging a deeper hole for himself. Maths tuition and all is fine, but maybe a cognitive understanding class was more needed in this household. There was no confusion which couldn’t be solved by a simple conversation with Janice, which would have taken barely 5 sentences and need not involve Edgar’s identity. Instead, Janice is locked in the basement, she is a believer in making a bad situation worse, by the way (maybe she also needs lessons in cognitive understanding), Tucci is doing something, which has nothing to do with anyone or anything but still features in the series, and there is a reporter investigating Janice’s disappearance? SOS, brain not computing.

Netflix, my dear Netflix, what is wrong hun? All ok? Childhood trauma working overtime? Why take the stellar cast, drive up your production cost and not have someone go through the script once? How did you even get Tucci and Tennant to sign up? Are you blackmailing them? Ok, apologies, got carried away for a bit there, but then the series is unbelievably bad. And the actors did a fantastic job. So much so that a case can be made that Janice was the real villain (and if you go by some of the reviews online, many writers have the same opinion), such is the residual emotion for her character. Listen, the premise is great, and with good writing, it might even make for a beautiful thriller. But working with what was given to us, unfortunately it makes for a horrible horrible play, which cannot be saved by acting alone. Please do better.