TV Series I've Missed Until Now: Family Tree (2013)

I really like actor Chris O’Dowd (THE I.T. CROWD and GET SHORTY) and will watch him in almost anything. So when I came across a comedy series starring him called FAMILY TREE, I didn’t hesitate to give it a try. It ran on HBO in 2013 for only one season of 8 half-hour episodes, so it wasn’t going to be much of an investment of time. I was a little leery of the format: it’s a mockumentary, written and directed by Christopher Guest, who is, of course, very well-known for the genre. But sometimes they don’t work great for me. Even so, I wanted to watch this one.

I’m glad I did. O’Dowd plays Tom Chadwick, who grew up in Ireland with his mother after his parents divorced. His sister (Nina Conti) remained in London with their father (Michael McKean) and is, well, a mite eccentric, carrying around a monkey puppet and talking through it. Tom has returned to London after a break-up and has a good but somewhat goofy friend who works in a zoo. All that is established pretty quickly, and then we get to the meat of the series. Tom’s great-aunt has died and left him a box full of family mementoes that pique his interest in his ancestors, and so he sets off to explore the family tree, leading to encounters with all sorts of bizarre relatives he didn’t know he had.

This series is known for being heavily improvised, and you can tell that. It’s also very funny at times, although I’ll admit it took a couple of episodes to grow on me. Most of the comedy is the same gentle, character-driven humor to be found in DETECTORISTS, one of my favorite series of recent years. FAMILY TREE can manage to be hilarious, uncomfortable, and heart-warming, all in the same half-hour. Tom’s dad is a fan of several fake British TV sitcoms, and the clips we see of those are very funny, too.

Quite a few fine comedic actors show up in supporting roles along the way: Fred Willard, Ed Begley Jr., Kevin Pollack, Will Sasso, Joe Lo Truglio, Graham Greene, and Bob Balaban are all on hand. I always enjoy seeing Michael McKean, and as always when I do, I wonder why Lenny went on to have such a long, productive career and Squiggy didn’t, but such are the ways of fame, I suppose.

The ending left me unable to tell if they hoped the series would continue or if it was always intended to be a one-and-done. But it’s sweet and wraps things up well enough. I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy FAMILY TREE, but I wound up liking it a lot. It’s a very nice change from the type of TV we usually watch, and I recommend it if you’re in the mood for an offbeat comedy.

TV Series I've Missed Until Now: Cranford (2007-2009)

Not gonna lie, we like us some high-class British historical drama. Yeah, they’re generally soap operas, but everybody dresses so nice and talks so fancy.

And so it is with CRANFORD, made by the BBC in 2007 and based on a series of novels by Elizabeth Gaskell. Technically, it has two seasons, but the first has only five episodes and the second consists of two movie-length episodes. So, seven episodes overall that cover a couple of years’ time in the 1840s in the small English village of Cranford, located in Cheshire. (I’d have to look that up to know where in England that is, and I’m not that ambitious.)

This is definitely a soap opera. We’ve got unrequited love, doomed love, disease, death, ambition, rotters, noble doctors, a heroine who wants to be a writer, scandal, and the inexorable changes wrought by time. It’s very well-made and well-acted, with scripts (all by Heidi Thomas, the main writer on CALL THE MIDWIFE, another show we like) that range from pretty darned funny to really sad. Everything that happens is pretty predictable, and I was extremely annoyed when the show came to an end and left a major plotline unresolved. All I can think is that they planned to address that in the next season and didn’t know the show was coming to an end.

Mostly, though, CRANFORD is a series where you spend a lot of time going, “Hey, it’s that guy from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Jim Carter, who played Carson the butler on that show and is Captain Brown, a retired military man in charge of building a railroad here. Carter is one of those guys who has a great voice and I like just listening to him talk) and “Hey, it’s Lady Mary from DOWNTON ABBEY!” (Michelle Dockery, who also has a great voice) and “Hey, it’s Loki from the Marvel movies!” (Tom Hiddleston, who’s a very good guy here) and “Hey, it’s Doctor Who!” (Jodie Whittaker, whose run as the Doctor I’ve never seen and never will) and “Hey, it’s Doc Martin’s aunt!” (Eileen Atkins from one of our favorite British series, DOC MARTIN) and “Hey, it’s Judi Dench!” (too many things to list).

Despite what you might think from my sarcasm, I really enjoyed CRANFORD. I wish they had made more seasons. I’m not going to read the books, mind you, but I’d have been happy to watch more of the TV version.

TV Series I've Missed Until Now: Detectorists (2014-2022)

I absolutely love this series.

With that succinct review out of the way, allow me to elaborate. DETECTORISTS is a British comedy TV series made between 2014 and 2022, consisting of three seasons of six episodes each plus two specials, for a total of twenty episodes. The protagonists are Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook), a pair of working class friends whose hobby is going out and searching in fields using metal detectors. They belong to a small club of fellow detectorists that often clashes with a rival group. The stories revolve around Lance and Andy’s efforts to find something worthwhile—Roman artifacts are the most highly prized, especially golden ones—along with their personal lives, including a few romances.

Doesn’t sound like much to build a TV series around, does it?

And yet DETECTORISTS is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Mackenzie Crook wrote and directed the entire series in addition to playing Andy. The scripts are superb. Most of the humor is of the gentle, whimsical type, but some of it is hilariously funny, especially if you have a hobby to which you’re devoted yourself. I mean, Lance being able to look at a button he’s unearthed and spout very detailed information about how old it is and where it was manufactured isn’t really that different from me looking at a vintage Western paperback and declaring that the cover art is by A. Leslie Ross because of the way the hats look.

You get invested in the characters in this series to the point that some of it is heartbreakingly poignant, too, and genuinely suspenseful. The characters are all fleshed out very well, and while most of them are eccentric, they’re never silly and are always believable, credit for which goes both to the writing and the fine performances by the cast, which includes the great Diana Rigg in one of her last roles as Andy’s mother-in-law.

It's safe to say that DETECTORISTS really resonated with me. I wish there were more seasons. Crook decided that it was time to end the series, though, and I have to respect that. The older I get, the more I seem to enjoy books, movies, and TV shows that have some warmth and humanity to them. DETECTORISTS really possesses those qualities. I give it my highest recommendation.