Smart New Cop Show From UK

FANS of The Wire will be especially gratified by the new BBC series, Luther, in which the man we once knew as Stringer Bell (Brit actor Idris Elba) becomes a brilliant/tormented police detective.

The show is dark, understated, and psychologically serious; the characters and their relationships are complex and well-drawn. The whole thing has a kind of brooding vibe to it: The Massive Attack song that plays over the opening credits sets the tone quite well.

HERE is my review from The Hollywood Reporter. The show made its U.S. debut last night and goes up Sundays at 10 pm.

Slacker Noir in San Diego

THERE'S a pretty good TV show that's just made its debut on FX. Terriers -- don't know about the name -- is like a Ross Macdonald novel crossed with The Big Lebowski. Or something like that. Either way, the casting and storytelling are quite fine. (The second episode goes up Wednesday.)

Here is my review, which leads this way:

The protagonist in FX's "Terriers," Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue), is two parts the Dude from "The Big Lebowski," one part '70s Kris Kristofferson. He works as an unlicensed private eye with a young partner even more naive than he is in Ocean Beach, a slightly hippie-esh San Diego neighborhood that recalls both "Jackie Brown" and Thomas Pynchon's latest slacker-noir novel. Hank, a recovering alcoholic, was fired from the local police force; we've heard that one before, too. So originally is not one of the great virtues of this show.

This is the first of occasional television reviews I'm writing for The Hollywood Reporter, which is under new management.

Villainous New Role for Ian McShane

IT was a real blast to meet Ian McShane recently to talk about his acting career, growing up in Manchester the son of a Man U player, and his new role as a scheming 12th century bishop on the miniseries "The Pillars of the Earth." Here is my interview for the LA Times.

Pillars does not compare to Deadwood, the program from which McShane is best known to Americans for his foul-mouthed saloon-keeper Al Swearengen, but it has its moments, and goes up on Starz Friday.

Elmore Leonard Goes to Kentucky

ONE of the programs that showed me that television could, at its rare best, offer the quality of acting, direction, set design and thematic development of the finest films was "Deadwood," that saga of the Wild West that HBO cancelled after three all-too-short seasons.

So it's exciting for me -- and the few dozen others who followed the show -- that "Deadwood" sheriff Timothy Olyphant will star as a lawman in a new series. The upcoming show, recently renamed "Justified," doesn't resemble "Deadwood" especially, and Olyphant's character, a former coal miner turned U.S. Marshal, does not have the brooding gravity of Seth Bullock. But still.

Here is my piece on the show, which goes up in March. I spoke to several behind the show, including Olyphant, who is a lot more like the series' Raylan Givens than Bullock, and was playing with an itunes playlist that included Dylan, Lucinda Williams and Supertramp (yecch!) in his trailer when I met him.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, the show is based on -- in the pilot, very closely, in later episodes quite loosely -- a character of crime titan Elmore Leonard. The octogenarian author of the novels that led to "Out of Sight," "Jackie Brown" and "Get Shorty" was the common denominator that brought the actors, writers and directors together for this one. His knack for crisp dialogue and rapid sketching of character is on full display in the story, "Fire in the Hole," the inspired the series.