The idea of combining two dissimilar characters into one team is far from new. The detective miniseries McDonald & Dodds is the case when this technique is fully revealed. Well, it’s also just a very cute British detective with his original chip.

Detective Chief Inspector Lauren McDonald is an ambitious young woman. She is assertive, quick to make decisions, uses all available modern forensic technology and tries to work with maximum efficiency. She has been involved with South London gangs for a long time and can put pressure on suspects if needed.

Detective Sergeant Dodds is her complete opposite. He is 55 years old and they have been trying to get him into early retirement for years now. For the last 11 years he has been doing nothing but paperwork. He is slow, indecisive, distracted, and armed only with an old, battered notepad and pencil. He’s not tech-savvy, doesn’t know anything about Uber or Spotify, and often can’t find his own glasses. But Sergeant Dodds knows how to notice what other policemen do not pay attention to, he has encyclopedic knowledge and an ideal memory, and also … he knows how to work with paper documents in the library!

The authorities brought these two very different police officers together with one goal – so that the energetic McDonald completely exhausted Dodds and forced him to retire after all. But it suddenly turned out that together they make up a very strange, but extremely effective couple, unraveling the most sophisticated crimes.

The events of the McDonald & Dodds miniseries take place in a city that, if it appears on movie screens, then only in historical dramas based on Jane Austen novels. This is Bath (Bath) – a resort in Somerset, well known since the time of Roman rule in Britain, a city named after the Roman baths and wholly included in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I don’t know if the Bath authorities had a hand in choosing the location for filming, but the city here is another character in the film, and quite an important one. For Lauren Macdonald, who came from London, this is the province in which she will have to work for a couple of years before being promoted; for Sergeant Dodds, this is the homeland, the history of which he is proud of.

As has been the case in English detective stories since the days of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there are no simple crimes at McDonald & Dodds. All murders (and these are murders, do you really doubt it?) are extremely sophisticated crimes in which the attacker tries to frame someone else and / or confuse the tracks, interfering with the investigation. Again, as is customary in English detective stories, all the suspects are known from the very beginning and the brave police only have to find out who committed this or that murder. In a word, McDonald & Dodds detective stories are generally very good, although here, unfortunately, the rule “suspect the most inconspicuous” works here. In addition, both of the existing episodes of the series, The Fall of the House of Crockett and Wilderness of Mirrors, are a bit similar to each other. Both there and there, the suspects are trying to influence the police by sending them on the wrong track.

However, the main charm of McDonald & Dodds is not even detective stories and the unusual atmosphere of a slightly provincial Bath. The main thing here is the opposition of heroes. Their approaches, habits, preferences. Plus quite obvious conflict of generations. And here we must pay tribute to the actor Jason Watkins, who plays the role of Sergeant Dodds. His absent-minded, almost retired detective turned out to be incredibly charming and in some ways similar to another detective well known to several generations of viewers … to Lieutenant Columbo played by the unchanging Peter Falk.

By and large, McDonald & Dodds has only one drawback, but a serious one. In the first season, there are only two episodes of an hour and a half each. And knowing the habit of the British to shoot seasons every two or three years, we are unlikely to see a continuation in the near future.