When the British mini-series Traffik first aired, it was a revelation. It shook governments and individuals alike with its depiction of how simple it was to manufacture heroin – and how all-pervasive the drug was becoming. It was so well done that it also won an International Emmy and three BAFTA Awards. Eleven years later, Steven Soderberg’s movie, Traffic – based on the mini-series – won an Oscar for Best Picture.
The mini-series follows a number of threads: poppy farming and the manufacture of heroin in Pakistan; the British housewife of a German businessman who has been arrested for smuggling drugs; how drugs affect the family of a British Minister.
John Lithgow [Bill Paterson] is the Minister for the Home Office and we follow him from the point where he is visiting Pakistan to learn about the drug trade and how British aid is used [or not] to help poppy farmers switch to another, less deadly crop. During his arc, he discovers that his daughter, Caroline [Julia Ormond], is a heroin addict.
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Midsommer Murders is one of those British mystery series that fall into a sub-genre called “the village mystery” – though, thanks to Caroline Graham, the writer on whose books the series is based, the setting is an entire county so there’s no one village that’s setting records for enduring enough murders to depopulate it. Also unlike a lot of British mystery series, our protagonists, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby [John Nettles] and Detective Sergeant Ben Jones [Jason Hughes] are not the next Sherlock Holmes and Watson, or even the Inspector Lynley and Sergeant Havers.
While village mysteries usually feature such brilliant and eccentric characters [whom I enjoy as much as anyone], Barnaby and Jones are more like beat cops who’ve been promoted because of their dogged persistence. Barnaby especially seems like a promoted beat cop with his blue collar approach and neighbourly cheer. Jones, once a Mason, seems like a slightly more pointed fellow who [very] occasionally gets away with taking the piss out of his senior partner. Nettles and Hughes have an easy chemistry, which gives them a formidable combined presence.
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It’s a reasonably nice day in Manchester in 2006 and Detective Inspector Sam Tyler [John Simm] and his team, which includes his girlfriend Maya [Archie Panjabi] have discovered another victim of a particularly cagey serial killer. When Sam and Maya quarrel about methodology and hunches, Maya stalks off and, following her hunch, is taken by the killer – which leads to Sam being hit by a car and waking up in 1973.
As Sam becomes acclimatized, however unwillingly, to his new environs – and their much earthier methods of policing – he comes to the conclusion that his situation is one of three things: madness; a coma, or actual time-traveling. One thing is for sure: Manchester of 1973 might as well be Manchester of 1953 from the misogynistic, rough & tumble, hunch-following nature of his new boss, Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt [Philip Glenister]. Only Women’s Police Constable Annie Cartwright [Liz White] is at all sympathetic to his confusion – Detective Sergeant Ray Carling [Dean Andrews] is outright hostile, and Detective Sergeant Chris Skelton [Marshall Lancaster] has no idea what to make of him.
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