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‘You’ve Done It Again, Lewis!’: On the Enduring Worth of ‘Inspector Morse’
There are, it seems, about a million British detective shows on offer to American audiences (about a million to the power of ten when you add in all the other European sleuthing nationalities), from heart-pumping “Luther” to the more sedate “Ms. Marple’s Mysteries.” Having grown up without cable and had 90 percent of my television-viewing experiences before high school courtesy of WGBH, I have a definite familiarity with the full range of British television offerings (“Vicar of Dibley,” “Keeping Up Appearances,” and “Waiting for God” were all household favorites), but age prevented me from ever making the acquaintance of “Inspector Morse.”
It took until halfway through high school, when I had, in a rare coup d’état, actually managed to get hold of the solitary television clicker, to see the Inspector on Netflix and my mother in no uncertain terms demanded that he disappear after half an hour. However, I was hooked. Even within the diverse range of detective dramas, Morse is a quite singular property, elaborate plotted, skillfully filmed, chock-full of more obscure references than an Umberto Eco novel, and poignant without being sappy or sentimental. A genius product of pop culture.
The titular Inspector is himself a bit of a departure from the typical flock of Brit detectives; an aging middle-class Englishman with an Oxford education, an accent that could only have come of childhood elocution lessons, and an equal love for real ale and Wagner. John Thaw’s piercing cornflower eyes and reserved expressiveness (perhaps a contradiction in terms, but entirely appropriate when one watches him balance the manners of an Englishman “of a certain age” with his innately virulent emotions) lend an odd sort of beauty to a character who is flawed both in body and soul. His eyes are most often crinkled in a decidedly contemptuous expression and, while he is as brilliant and sensitive as the brief background suggests, he is equally capable of cruelty and vanity. Along for the ride is his much more centered DS, Robbie Lewis, a cheerful Northerner with two kids, a wife, and every day worries.
Inspector Morse rarely throws a punch, or even runs for that matter, and seems to delight more in catching grammatical mistakes than criminals, but the 90-minute-long mysteries he solves are almost always expertly plotted, even if such an occurrence of murders in Oxford would make it a rival with Detroit for violent crime. The ancient city and surrounding countryside, a cast of characters from all levels of society, clues from the depths of academic obscurity, and a hastily driven Jag Mark II twine to create both watchable and moving tales. There is, in the interactions Morse and his faithful sidekick have with the secondary “goodies,” the suggestion of a lifetime’s worth of life; of pain, love, triumph, and failure.
All of this may make for a good TV show, even a great one, but it doesn’t quite tell why “Inspector Morse” deserves viewing, why it has a place within the western pop-culture canon that has been set out by Paul Cantor. It deserves such a spot because it is a compellingly told tale of the heights and depths of man and his nature, of the role that morality must play in a society and an individual life for it to be meaningful, and the need to preserve the cultural products of the past. Morse himself, reflecting the complexity of our world, is both the best and the worst man to defend and show all three. He devotes his life to catching criminals and riding his little corner of the world of the horror that man’s baser nature perpetuates, but cannot bring himself to stop any of his own self-destructive habits. He acts as the enforcer of morality in his community and goes above and beyond to see justice done, but his own moral sense, guided by ancient more than Christian virtues, often suffers in the process. He enjoys the best cultural products of the past and tries his best to imbue his sergeant with the same love, in a culture that is moving deliberately in the other direction.
Perhaps the best analogue to Inspector Morse, both in character and literary worth, is Philip Larkin. In a way, they almost inhabit a single personality, instinctive conservatives with a dread of the modern world, an acidic but regretful atheism, and equal measures kindness and cruelty within their instinct. Even their gradual declines, watched with horror and consternation by the friends they never quite seem to comprehend that they had and punctuated by heavy drinking and failed loves, mirror each other, ending in relatively early demises. Larkin’s poems, meanwhile, express the same kind of alienation from modern society, search for meaning, and childlike joy in the achievements of days gone by as the hard-drinking detective’s ninety-minute narratives.
“Inspector Morse,” in much the same way as The Whitsun Weddings or High Windows, contains a world within its thirty-three episodes. It is an intensely, almost painfully, human world, filled with the best, the worst, and all that falls in between to create a life, to create a story both intimate and universal. A world that should be watched.
*I should admit, as an addendum, that there is a certain amount of nostalgia that I have about this show that makes me far from the most impartial of critics (and if that this post seems excessively strange or poorly written, that I am extremely jet-lagged).
The summer before I left for college, I mostly worked at home (partly because I have a special-needs sibling who needs frequent supervision and partly because the mechanics of orchestrating my move to the UK needed much planning, especially since the release of AP results meant that we didn’t actually know where I was headed until July), and my dad’s carpentry shop is, linked with my uncle’s auto body shop, right next to our house.
This meant that I grew up with him dragging me to the various job sites and warehouses where he plied a good portion of his trade, but also that he is always home for lunch. Since I insisted on us having BritBox, he began watching “Inspector Morse” when he was on lunch break at home, after seeing the panel for a half-watched episode in the continue watching section, with me. He is worthless with names, so generally I’m asked “to find the show with that grumpy old bastard, I can never remember his damn name when I go to type it in.”
Now, every break that I am home, we watch Inspector Grumpy Old Bastard together (my mom still vacates the room within the first minute if she is home), and he is just as invested as me, maybe even a bit more so. And maybe, just maybe, when I’m feeling a little homesick late on a Saturday night, I plug my headphones and watch an old episode under the covers.
Published in Entertainment
Morse is definitely a character that, at least for most people, takes a bit of warming up to (there’s a reason my dad calls him Inspector Grumpy Old Bastard). Maybe seeing Endeavour first could even make him a bit more palatable? Certainly, the Morse of the books is 1000x less sympathetic and likable than the man portrayed in the TV series, and Lewis spends a good portion of them wondering if he can resist the temptation to murder him. I think one of the brilliances of the show is how it is plotted with Lewis. When it begins, Lewis only really knows Morse by his largely negative reputation and agrees to work a case with him, in the midst of difficulties. The keep up that tentative, and often annoyed, arrangement for the first series, but as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to believe that they aren’t a set pair. Intimacy grows, often in very little ways (learning Morse’s first name or about his Oxford career), and the characters with it, especially in terms of seeing how much of the Morse of the beginning is smoke and mirrors to disguise the very human and humane man inside. Lewis is the window through which the viewer is watching the final act of Morse’s life, and his journey from tentative admiration and annoyance to deep affection and sadness mirror how, I think, Dexter wants the viewer to feel about their experience with Morse. That being said, he never loses the ability to be a little smug, at all the wrong times.
I admit that I actually rooted a bit for her to get with David (I don’t think he ever quite managed to fall out of love with her), but it’s a great show all the same. I do confess that I have a taste for some of the more brutal and dark British comedies, like Blackadder, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, and Waiting for God, but I think even their ‘prickly bits’ come from a fundemntally different (to the US), deeply culture sense of what is funny. And even they have their gentler moments.
90% of the reason I have a VPN subscription when I live in England during term is so I can watch BritBox. There’s an irony somewhere there, but I’m going to ignore it.
Oh yes the one Blackadder were he’s a bishop of something. I’m Catholic but that was just wicked cruel and absolutely hilarious.
I prefer the one where he owes money to the Black Bishop of Bath and Wells.
I feel a bit of Catholic guilt for that, but 100x more for finding Father Ted so funny.
I find my local library has many of the Morse, Lewis and Endeavour discs. I always check there first and have been, thus far, able to avoid subscriptions to Britbox.
Now we need to discuss female detective leads…
And Father Ted is a guilty pleasure.
At least 90% of what we watch is from Acorn and Britbox (the rest is Amazon and Netflix) – nothing at all from American networks. Ooops – I misspoke, we love Yellowstone, Better Call Saul and Vikings, but at least those are not on the Big 4.
The only American show I watch at the moment (and watch in this context has a liberal, one episode every two months meaning) is The Sopranos. I enjoy it, but I have the same feeling towards it as David Foster Wallace books; they’re brillant, but if I consume too much (of the relentless veniality, horror, and tedium, intermixed as they may be with humor and morality) at once then I’m trapped in ennui for days. (I lied a bit; my best friend at uni and I like to watch a few episodes of Longmire whenever we do movie night, but I had seen most of the run before and read 3 of the books, 2 in one memorable night).
I’m going to be tougher on Inspector Morse, but I appreciate the conversation and value the program more than most of its era.
The early Morse‘s were done in the late 1980’s. The sound recording was often terrible, and they didn’t seem to know how to “fix it in post(-production)” either. The video format of the time doesn’t easily translate to current HD specs, so it still looks uneven on BritBox. As for the current cycle of reruns acquired by some PBS affiliates, I’ve tried to determine — so far without success — whether someone is cherry-picking the episodes or they’ve added a new level of image correction, because the last few that aired looked alright. Still, it’s no match for the high definition original Lewis in the Oxford ambiance-and-breathtaking-views department.
I never much cared for Morse as a character. He’s an intellectual snob, an outspoken liberal, a hopeless and unapologetic drunk, and his first instincts about his cases (to his verbally abused whipping boy Lewis) are often wrong. We watch it anyhow, because murders among the very educated are fun to watch, and because my wife and I both enjoy Kevin Whately’s Robbie Lewis very much. We love how Lewis reacts to his dinosaur boss, the self-appointed Detective Inspector of the grammar police.
Lewis’ relationships with the arrogant Oxford crowd remind me of Columbo a little bit, the working class cop underestimated by elitists who think they can get away with murder. Watching him in Morse as the loyal underling preps us for our next sequence of Lewis reruns. Lewis is one of those mysteries we’ll watch in reruns forever, a rare class of programs which around here also includes NYPD Blue, New Tricks, Foyle’s War, Scott & Bailey, Poirot, the first 252 Law & Order‘s, the early Sherlock‘s, most of the various Miss Marple‘s, and I think probably Professor T, a relatively recent puzzle mystery from Belgium.
Endeavour is a odd conceit for the production team to have chosen in the aftermath of the Lewis series, a pre-prequel set in the 1960’s. So conscious were the Endeavour writers of their debt to (the far more period accurate) Mad Men that they actually scripted in an homage with a character fielding a phone call from “Lane at SCDP in New York.” That would be Lane Pryce at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the Mad Men ad agency. [So you could place that Endeavour episode exactly within the Mad Men era, after the (Jared Harris) Pryce character became a founding partner of SCDP, but before he succeeded at his second attempt at suicide.] A good moment, but maybe Shaun Evans as an illegitimate son of Morse succeeding Lewis in contemporary Oxford would have worked better than doing 1960’s Britain without Beatles music or Carnaby Street fashions.
Frankly, the Shaun Evans character called Endeavour Morse is really nothing like the John Thaw original. Their voices and faces aren’t even close. Endeavour is written as a truly brilliant detective. He has sex appeal to women. His relationship with CS Bright (played to perfection by Anton Lesser) grows in a mutually respectful direction. That thin, disciplined cop could never turn into the obese, two-faced, unappreciative CS Bright whose poor managerial style helped drive John Thaw’s Morse to drink.
Nevertheless, there’s enough in both Morse and Endeavor to merit a second look at each series. The mystery genre has staying power, and if you squeeze in enough reruns between viewings, sometimes it’s easier to forget the final twists you’ve already seen.
We noticed the less than perfect video and audio quality, but because we live in the middle of nowhere and BritBox in particular has a tendency to start constantly buffering, just dismissed it as them. I agree that Morse can be an abrasive character, but I’m not quite sure I would define him as a liberal; he holds certain liberal/stereotypically “educated” views (atheism, etc) but his love of high culture is fundamentally conservative and I think he sees at least some of his job as standing against the tide of social in-cohesion (he also admits at one point to being a Tory voter). Perhaps from a different perspective from Lewis, he also isn’t terribly over awed by the denizens of Oxford high society and his commentary on the nature of English academia (from first hand experience) is incisive. And his treatment of Lewis, while often abrasive, is layered. It bears comparison to his interactions with Max, the ME, to whom he can be equal measures cruel and kind and who doesn’t hesitate to give a bit back.
I definitely agree that Endeavour is a different character from the Morse of the first series, but I think the prequel shows, especially as time progresses, just how Morse ends up as he is (the beginning of his heavy drinking, the constant involvement with unstable women, authority issues, etc). The CS of Inspector Morse isn’t Bright, though, it’s actually Jim Strange. But thank you for the little education on the film/audio quality, I think (having been born in 1999) that I have the tendency to think anything filmed pre-2000 (and even after) will look grainy and awful unless it’s been post corrected.
You really need to acquaint yourself with @garymcvey here, as he is our resident film expert, both in terms of industry knowledge and technical knowledge. TV, prior to the HD era, was rarely shot to anywhere near film quality because it didn’t need to be, but that doesn’t mean that all TV production was at some equally high or equally low standard for the format. The better stuff doesn’t look particularly grainy, while the cheaper stuff – well it’s a miracle anything survived at all.
Yes, sorry, but that gap is still there with Strange. Really everything has been altered to fix Morse for our sensibilities 25 years later. Especially tone. Men like original Morse are gone in life and in period fiction. When they do that to my generation it bothers me. Less so the likes of E. Morse.
Maybe 50 years from now the BBC will still be around to fiddle with your generations of cultural history. Give ‘me hell, kid.
The lying about history is horrible – it is erasing the past out of embarrassment and a wish for what never was. That it occurs in fiction is, in its way, more horrific than the erasure of actual history because it is in fiction that you really feel and sense how people lived, talked, gossiped, cooked, and lived in the world. People learn more about the past, I think, from how it is portrayed in fiction than they do from history books. The history books focus on the “big picture” stuff at the expense of the everyday, but it is the novels of all sorts that people tend to understand the past. Good writers of historical fiction know this – which is why you can learn much about British life during the Napoleonic wars just by reading some Jane Austen and Patrick O’Brian.
Retconning the past, even in fiction, is among the worst of propagandistic lies.
I agree completely that they’ve gone wonkily ahistorical in some ways in their portrayal of Morse in Endeavour, and a lot of the other characters as well. It shows a disturbing and creeping tendency towards dismissing all history as irrelevant at best and damaging at worst in Western culture, something that in it of itself I think has deep Rousseauian roots. There are some bright spots, never the less, though, more in literature than media. It does a disservice to the very concept of fiction and story telling to mold characters to present fashions rather than to the shape of their stories and times, even if they weren’t in full agreement with them. Certainly, I hope there will still be people who recognize both the good and the bad of the cultural products of my generation in 50 years time, because there has been a lot of both, maybe more bad than good.
Well, every generation is shaped by the ones before it, and not always the parental generation but the grand-parents’ generation who still holds the real power and influence while the parents are still young, broke, and footless. You’re about the same age as my eldest daughter, and for the most part her teachers have been not my own cohort of GenXers, but the last wave of the Boomers. This has shifted markedly, though, for my younger kids, whose teachers are my own cohort. Historians (the good ones anyway) recognize this when trying to untangle the pathologies of each time period to sort the wheat from the chaff, and moreover the generational distinctions that seem so razor sharp to us will, at 100 years remove, blur and seem meaningless. Just look at how we view the Victorian age – the lady ruled for what, 6 decades? Only Lizzy the Second has surpassed her. Yet we think of “Victorian” as monolithic, even though her reign encompassed our Civil War and Reconstruction, and more besides, while in the UK she witnessed the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution and endless changes in fashion, taste, language, and manners.
Put simply – your generation’s reputation is likely as safe as any in its eventual obscurity, and its sins and triumphs will be lumped in with those of several others. You’ll see this in your own children, who will see your childhood as equally foreign as that of your grandparents.
Yes, it’s a big problem when they distort history. When they get a period realistically correct (often by collaborating with insiders/consultants) they make art, whether it’s re-creating the past, or contemporaneously created as we now look back at it from the present. It’s all about the research. Tom Wolfe used his “New Journalism” research techniques for literary inspiration; David Milch’s collaboration with Detective Bill Clark was at the core of NYPD Blue‘s success; every episode of Mad Men credits Matthew Weiner’s advertising industry consultants, and perfectionist that he is, he also interviewed dozens — maybe hundreds — of others.
Endeavour doesn’t distort history so much as it reinvents the Morse franchise. Like the way they reinvented Dallas by declaring Season Nine a bad dream. Call it artistic licence. Or licentiousness, if you prefer. Sadly, the period setting of Endeavour misses too many dramatic, visual, and musical opportunities of the era. Anyone old enough can speak to how. The 1960’s history I’d most like to see exploited in a crime series is the cultural/political mistakes that were made. The writers should read a book like Destructive Generation to gauge the kind of wickedness which keeps repeating itself today.
I do think Endeavor is more watchable today than Inspector Morse because it accepts the learned conventions (rather than “fashions”) of three strong decades of scripted mass audience TV. It’s far less depressing. The character has a dimensioned relationship with a smart, attractive woman. He’s not always annoyed, nasty, or emanating misery and pessimism. He’s a decent human being, a sympathetic protagonist. You could argue, hey, murder is depressing and takes a terrible toll on cops. True, but the mystery genre often suspends that darker reality for an optimistic convention: the criminals get caught, the victims are vindicated, and the detective finds redemption in restoring the balance of justice. Sometimes, he even buys everyone a round.
You should have lead with this.
Not wrong. Sometimes I like to frustrate him by asking “Which one, Dad?” And thus ensues a 10 minute conversation, in which he can remember neither the city it takes place in, the name of the lead character, or which streaming service (of the three we have) that it’s on. “The one with that grumpy old bastard, who’s always yelling at the guy who talks funny, and they all have the fat boss in England.”
Ah, Rumpole!
I never got into Morse, but after reading this Kirkian Wanderer, I’ll give it a chance, you sound like you’ve got good taste.
I love Rumpole! My brother was a fan since he was a child but I’d never watched an episode until a few years ago when I bought him the box set for Christmas.