Bodkin premieres on Netflix on May 9.
By Elazar Abrahams
Billed as a “comedic thriller,” Bodkin is the latest miniseries offering in the ongoing collaboration between Netflix and the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground. It follows American podcasters and a British journalist that travel to a remote village in Ireland in hopes of recording the next great true crime show. The seven episodes have an intriguing enough premise with murder and mayhem and fish out of water tourists, but unfortunately the season is a total dud, and the genre-meshing never amounts to anything notable.
At its core, Bodkin is just too unexciting to be a successful television series. It isn’t funny or witty enough to recommend as a comedy, and it isn’t thrilling or propulsive enough to be a good mystery. The characters are shallow; from Will Forte’s Gilbert Power to David Wilmot’s Seamus Gallagher, every player is one-note and gives the audience nothing to latch onto. Gilbert has some (mostly offscreen) divorce drama that gets teased out as the story progresses, and Seamus might seem like an innocent bloke, but perhaps he’s hiding a shady past. Combined with stiff cinematography, the meager writing is just numbing at points. It’s unclear if the scripts think they’re playing with clichés of the true crime genre, or are just merely recycling them. Or maybe the showrunners thought they could coast on Irish countryside vibes alone, but aside from some fun accents, even the vibes are minimal.
Siobhán Cullen, who plays Dove, gets some dramatic dialogue to chew at, but it’s hard not to wonder why the show completely wastes Will Forte. With such a proven comedic talent and a penchant for character work, one must assume Gilbert is due for some sort of big capital A ‘Acting,’ the sort of clip shown in an Emmy reel. But it never comes, and it’s strange watching Forte be so subdued the entire runtime of the series.
Some of the episodes end with just enough of an intriguing cliffhanger to keep you from closing the tab on Bodkin. Rest assured though, you’re missing nothing if you give this mystery a skip.
I give Bodkin a D+.
TV and City 