When you’re writing a hard-boiled mystery series with a tragically stoic protagonist — a significant chunk of the television market these days — a little comic self-awareness is a valuable commodity. “It’s never straightforward with you, is it, Jack?” a friend asks the eponymous hero of “Jack Irish,” after what looked like a traffic accident turns out to be a homicide with ties to academic fraud, drug dealing, dirty immigration agents and big pharma. Strike,” the BBC-Cinemax adaptation of J.K. Rowling’s mystery novels. That is, it’s a straightforward, noirish mystery starring a laconic, mostly noble, unapologetically genre-friendly gumshoe. “Jack Irish” isn’t unserious — there are grisly deaths and beatings, and the incident in the first movie, “Bad Debts” (2012), that threw the high-flying lawyer Irish off the rails and into a life as a bagman and part-time private eye was unusually savage.

Source: New York Times September 09, 2018 17:15 UTC