What's behind TV's weird obsession with 'young detectives'?
In Netflix’s new crime show, Young Wallander, Swedish newcomer Adam P?lsson plays a bad boy rookie cop with razorblade cheekbones and the sort of perma-pout that could freeze a burglar at 50 paces. The bit that’s hard to get your head around is that this is supposedly the youthful incarnation of the same Kurt Wallander that Kenneth Branagh had such fun portraying as a perpetually crestfallen middle-aged alcoholic on BBC One between 2008 and 2016.
Could P?lsson’s ice-cool matinee idol really have calcified into Branagh’s stuffy sleuth? Whodunits have traditionally been a grumpy older person’s game. From Wallander to Inspector Morse via Prime Suspect’s DCI Jane Tennison, many miles on the clock and a ruinous drinking habit were the historical hallmarks of every small-screen gumshoe worth their badge.
The unspoken assumption was that cynicism, tobacco stains and a fondness for lunchtime pints ranked among the key qualifications for the great TV crime-solvers. Bright eyes and bushy tails – to say nothing of an active love life – were grounds for immediate disqualification.
But now the cult of youth has finally come knocking, and watching the detectives isn’t quite what it used to be. Booze and autumnal bitterness are out. Very much in are youth, vigour and other similarly annoying attributes. The vogue has, in truth, been ongoing for some time. It has done so in the form of Prime Suspect 1973 (from 2017), and the long-running Endeavour, which since 2012 has tracked the early years of Oxford ace Inspector Morse. The concept is, however, taken to extremes in Young Wallander, a gritty prequel developed with the blessing of Wallander creator Henning Mankell prior to his death in 2015.
The show signals from the outset that this is not the Wallander you used to enjoy while sipping cocoa. It does so with a pre-credits scene in which a man with a grenade wedged in his mouth has his face blown off. Branagh’s Wallander wouldn’t be having any of that as he rambled around Scania province in his depressed-looking jacket – but then again, the producers have described Young Wallander as a “prequel that’s also a reimagining”. The other confusing thing about Young Wallander is that it is set slap bang in present-day Malm?, where our hero drives around listening to hip hop. Here we have a prequel apparently taking place subsequent to the events chronicled in its parent show.
Is this a Christopher Nolan movie in disguise? “The general trend in the de-ageing has been to make them more impulsive and dynamic, but with less of the gravitas they have in their older versions,” says Barry Forshaw, a crime fiction authority and author of Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide and The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction. “This has not always been successful. Lynda La Plante was very unhappy with the TV version of the young Jane Tennison. I pointed out to her that any young actress” – in the event, Doctor Thorne and Emerald City alumna Stefanie Martini” – would be coming up against Helen Mirren. But she still felt it could be done. However, she ended her association with the series.”
Prime Suspect 1973 was in any event regarded as a critical and commercial disappointment, and ITV chose not to renew. Yet any concerns, or indeed hopes, that the detective genre’s youth obsession would disappear with it have proved misplaced. Quietly going from strength to strength all the while is Morse spin-off Endeavour, which now chugs merrily towards its eighth year. “It was originally just a one-off,” the show’s creator Russell Lewis told Den of Geek in 2019. “There is an audience that has come to Endeavour first and then from Endeavour has come to Morse,” he continued. “That’s quite a nice way to do it.”
Endeavour is clearly a success and arguably every bit as satisfying as Morse. As with Tennison, it ticks the period box – another trend in little danger of dying out – and draws a satisfying distinction between the prejudices of the Sixties and those of the present. But it is also careful not to get too caught up in its own complicated mythology. Shaun Evans insists that he plays Endeavour Morse as an original character rather than as a de-aged John Thaw. It has been theorised that Wallander, Tennison and the gang have been de-aged in order to appeal to a younger viewership. And yet, the audience for crime television is believed to trend much as it always has, towards the middle-aged.
The other theory goes that these “young detective” shows present a more rounded psychology of their iconic protagonists. The idea is that you don’t really “know” Morse until you’ve caught up with him in Endeavour, which begins with the young police constable on the brink of resigning in disillusionment until he is reeled in by the case of a missing 15 year-old. Similarly, in Young Wallander, we see the character wooing future wife, Mona, and setting out on the path to alcoholism. “We try not to think of it as a tragedy, but more of a puzzle that needs to be put together. I mean, we know where he goes,” producer Berna Levin told one newspaper. “It is sad and it is dark. Every time he picks up a drink, it’s sort of like, “No, that’s not going to end well. You don’t want to do that”.”
But the true motive may be more straightforward. The original Inspector Morse ran over 13 years. Helen Mirren played Tennison on and off for a decade and a half. That’s a long time – when you’ve exploited every narrative possibility with an older character, a jump backwards by several decades frees you up again. It’s less about the youth than about the new beginning. And it is a reminder that, just as in superhero movies and European club football, in small-screen crime the franchise rules supreme.
“It’s an inevitable consequence of the publishing and TV industries’ desire to play safe by making use of names with an established following,” says Linda Wilson, who runs the Crime Review blog. She points out that the trend is just as established in publishing as on television. “It can be a difficult trick to pull off, but several authors have proved it can be made to work.
James Henry and Danny Miller both did a good job with a younger Jack Frost and young adult writers Charlie Higson and Steve Cole have done the same for James Bond, while Andrew Lane has gone further back in time with his young Sherlock Holmes series. The trick is to take the essence of the character but avoid the pitfalls of projecting back onto their younger selves the accumulated weight of later experience.”
Occasionally, the process occurs in reverse. Many fans of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels believed apple-cheeked John Hannah too young to play the taciturn Edinburgh detective when he was cast at age 38 in 2000. When the part was reassigned to then 52-year-old Ken Stott in a reboot in 2006, it was regarded as an overdue gesture of fealty towards the source material (though a mooted reboot of the reboot, currently mired in BBC development purgatory, will feature a younger actor once again). The prequel route may also represent the lesser of two evils. It would be unthinkable that anyone apart from Helen Mirren play “present day” Jane Tennison.
The same is surely true of Morse and John Thaw – and of Luca Zingaretti in the Italian crime series Inspector Montalbano, rebooted in 2012 by RAI as the Young Montalbano (Wallander is an exception insofar as Krister Henriksson portrayed him in parallel with Branagh in a Swedish-language adaptation). So if you can’t swap out Mirren for a star of similar vintage – but presumably reduced wattage – surely the next best solution is to go back to the Sixties or Seventies and start over. The character receives an infusion of youth. And devotees are less likely to cry heresy over the replacement of a beloved actor.
“There’s a sense that viewers don’t like the actor changing,” says crime author and blogger Sarah Ward. “John Thaw was irreplaceable, as Morse, as is Luca Zingaretti as Montalbano. So TV producers look for what is, in effect, a prequel. They can bring in a much younger actor with new storylines and it doesn’t feel like tampering too much with an icon. I do hope it doesn’t become too much of a thing. I’m not sure I fancy a young Miss Marple.”
Young Wallander is now available on Netflix
