Neil Cross’s crime series is grim, frequently preposterous and often good, because Idris Elba and Ruth Wilson play their long flirtation as if nobody else existed. Believe none of the plotting and there is a great deal to enjoy.
Neil Cross’s series opens with a detective on a gantry above a drop, a child-killer hanging from the edge, and the detective taking a moment too long to decide whether to help. That is John Luther (Idris Elba), and it is the whole programme in one scene: a policeman who knows what people have done before he can prove it, and whose conscience is the only thing between him and doing the same. What follows is grim, often absurd and frequently good, and the good comes almost entirely from two actors.
Elba plays intelligence as impatience. He does not deduce so much as arrive, and everyone else catches up. He is a big man and he uses it, sitting on the edges of desks, filling doorways, wearing the same coat in every weather as though he had forgotten he owned anything else. When the writing is thin, and it often is, he fills the space with temper. When it is good, he goes quiet and lets us watch him think.
The other actor is Ruth Wilson, as Alice, whose parents are found dead in the first episode and whom Luther decides, within an hour of meeting her, has killed them. He cannot prove it. She knows he cannot. Their scenes are the reason to watch: a flirtation conducted across interview tables and park benches, each of them the only person the other finds interesting. We were unsettled by the first of those scenes more than we expected to be, and it was Wilson who did it, holding Elba’s gaze a beat past politeness and then smiling as if he had passed a test. The programme is never better than when she is in it and never worse than when it forgets her.
Around them Cross has built a decent supporting cast and given them less to do. Indira Varma plays Zoe, Luther’s estranged wife, with a weariness that suggests years of this before we arrived. Steven Mackintosh’s Ian Reed is the colleague who has covered for him before and would rather not do it again. Saskia Reeves, as his boss Rose Teller, gets the thankless job of asking for evidence. Dermot Crowley’s Martin Schenk, dry and unhurried, is the one policeman in the building who appears to have read the rulebook, and Michael Smiley’s Benny Silver supplies the computer work and most of the jokes. Later series bring in Nikki Amuka-Bird and, eventually, Hermione Norris as Vivien Lake.
Six cinematographers have worked on it, Julian Court among them, and they hold to a single look: London at dusk or after it, sodium orange against deep blue, Luther a dark shape on rooftops and bridges with the skyline behind him. It is handsome and a little pleased with itself. Paul Englishby’s score leans on low strings and a slow pulse and knows when to stop, which is more than the plotting does. Brian Kirk and Sam Miller are among the directors, and the better episodes have a patience the worse ones lack. The seven editors, Victoria Boydell among them, cut the chases fast and the interviews slow, which is the right way round.
The trouble is the villains. Each case brings a new murderer, and Cross likes them grotesque: masks, rituals, a taste for the theatrical that belongs in a horror film and sits oddly in a police station. Luther works them out by staring at a wall until the answer arrives, and the series asks us to take his certainty as evidence. Sometimes we did. By the third such case we were bored, and then irritated, because the actors were plainly better than the puzzle they had been handed and the puzzle kept winning. The series also has a habit of putting Luther’s friends in danger to prove the stakes are high, and after a while the stakes start to feel like a tax.
It ran to five series between 2010 and 2019: six episodes, then four, four, two and four, and the shape tells you something. The first six have room to breathe; the two-episode fourth series barely has time to take its coat off. Against Cracker and Prime Suspect, which also built themselves around one damaged, brilliant investigator, Luther has little interest in how the police work and a great deal in how its lead looks against the skyline. Watch the first series for Elba and Wilson, and do not ask the killers to make sense. It carries a 15 certificate and earns it.
