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Masterpiece Mystery!
Sunday, June 22, at 9 p.m.
on WKAR-HD and WKAR-23
"Inspector Lewis" Returns to "Masterpiece Mystery!"
Secrets, celebrity, sexual politics and homicide—it must be summer on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! The go-to source for the best in British crime thrillers is back with a revamped
look, a new host to be announced mid-May, and a fresh supply of body bags.
This season features The Men of Mystery!, welcoming back Inspector Lewis, while bidding a fond farewell to Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) in series finales to Foyle’s War and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, airing in July and August. The plot doesn’t get any thicker than this.
The murder and mayhem begin Sunday, June 22, at 9 p.m., with the first all-new series of Inspector Lewis. Kevin Whately (The English Patient) returns as Detective Inspector Robbie Lewis in this spin-off to the popular Inspector Morse series, which featured Lewis as the working-class foil to the reclusive, erudite, Oxford Detective Chief Inspector Morse (John Thaw).
When the Inspector Lewis pilot debuted on Mystery! in 2006, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Inspector Lewis is more than just a homage to ‘Morse’: With Whately and Fox in the leading roles, it works quite well on its own.”
Back in Oxford, following the death of his wife in an unsolved hit-and-run two years earlier, Lewis is working to rebuild his life—confronting his past, his future, even his fear of public speaking. He’s stepped out of the late Morse’s long shadow and with his younger sidekick, the cool, cerebral Detective Superintendent James Hathaway (Laurence Fox, Gosford Park), is bent on proving himself to his dubious new boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Jean Innocent.
As they rack up professional successes, Lewis and Hathaway find themselves developing a growing respect and personal fondness for one another. Lewis learns that Hathaway, a former seminarian, isn’t quite as straight-laced as he seems, while Hathaway discovers that behind Lewis’s bluster there’s a broken heart trying to heal.
The first program, Whom the Gods Would Destroy, airs Sunday, June 22. A middle-aged Oxford graduate turns up dead near his run-down houseboat, sending Lewis and Hathaway down a twisting trail rife with literary allusions and unexpected associations. The detectives discover that back in his undergraduate days, the victim was a member of a club with roots in the Greek myth of Dionyssus. But when they look to his former schoolmates for help, no one is talking. Anna Massey (Sense and Sensibility) guest stars.
The following week is Old School Ties. Assigned by DCS Innocent to chaperone a celebrity criminal, the so-called “first of the rock-and-roll hackers,” on his controversial visit to speak at Oxford, technophobe Lewis is convinced that the assignment is a waste of time and mental bandwidth. Soon, though, two people are dead, and Lewis and Hathaway have their hands full with a trio of self-assured students and a high-profile professor, each of whom has a personal agenda and a potential motive for the killings. Gina McKee (The Forsyte Saga) stars as a widow with a surprising connection to the case—and to Lewis’s past.
The third program, Expiation, airs in July. When an Oxford “soccer mom” is found hanged in her home following a visit from a mysterious stranger, Lewis and Hathaway uncover a web of family and sexual intrigue that convince them the initial suicide verdict may not tell the whole story. A renowned professor, near death and plagued by his own terrible secret, claims to hold the key that will unlock the mystery, but first he wants something from Lewis and Hathaway. As time passes and tension mounts, the partners worry that they may be staking the outcome of the case on a conversation between a dying man and a terminally damaged one. James Wilby (Gosford Park) plays the grieving widower with something to hide.
published: June 17, 2008
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