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Discovering Luther

Discovering Luther

Dedicated television viewers know that there will always be shows that everyone wants you to watch, either it’s a cult show, a show that ended way before it’s time, or seems to grab everyone’s attention but yours. However many viewers find themselves stumbling upon these shows either years later or late into a shows run. I’ve compiled a list of ten shows, published once a week, that have become classics or are on their way to doing so and have recently been discovered by this writer.

Luther one

Luther
Created by Neil Cross
Original run 2010- Present
BBC One

I admit my initial interest in Luther was spawned by my slightly obsessive love of Idris Elba, a totally wonderful and sometimes underrated actor who always manages to surprise me (he was the only good thing in Prometheus, and he’s great in RocknRolla). But man is Luther something to see.

The story of a painfully smart detective in London, John Luther (Idris Elba) seems to take everything in and let it all out in bursts of rage. When the series opens his wife has cheated on him and he’s just let a suspect almost drop to his death, all of which shakes his confidence and almost puts him in prison. The stunt destroys his marriage. His wife doesn’t stop loving him because of what he did but what it turned him into.

Turns out Luther is a man who believes that love is the driving force to most things in life and is willing to go to battle for it, and that includes protecting his future ex-wife from an insane obsessive genius Alice (Ruth Wilson), who becomes obsessed with John after he investigates her for the murder of her parents. Luther and Alice are two sides of the same coin. Both are brilliant, and neither one know when to stop. You get the sense almost immediately that even though Luther knows what she is he still enjoys the game.

Luther two

The show so clearly belongs to Elba and the brilliance he brings to the role. His Luther is the smartest man in the room, any room, and he knows it. He’s a man always picking the lesser of two evils and tortured by those same decisions. He’s a massive ball of contradictions, a tall hulking man who uses his brain more than his bulk. He catches almost everything around him and lets it consume him.

Luther isn’t just a quirky, disheveled detective procedural. It’s smartly written and anchored down by an exceptional performance from Elba. Luther is a show that relishes in contradictions and doesn’t hesitate to send its character so far to the edge that his toes are hanging off the side of a building (literally in one particularly memorable scene of the first episode). The show manages to be one of the most finally tuned, cliché free shows on television. It also somehow manages to be more than a cop show. John Luther is a cop that is defined by the darkness that surrounds him. The show is defined by that fascinating darkness as well.

Tressa Eckermann

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