Whitstable Pearl: Charming Enough, but More Muddled Than Mysterious
Photo Courtesy of Acorn TV
Whether or not Acorn TV’s newest original mystery series, Whitstable Pearl, will work for you will depend entirely on how you respond to the phrase “cozy Scandi noir.”
That’s right: Cozy. Scandi. Noir.
Baffled and a bit put off by the combo? Probably best to cut your losses and move on. Struck like (cozy) lightning by the (gritty) ocean of possibilities such a mash-up might offer? Honestly, there’s not much I could add to get you more excited; just get thee to acorn.tv in time for the series’ big Monday premiere.
Everyone else, though—the confused but intrigued, the tentatively optimistic—go ahead and keep reading. This review is for you.
Adapted from former EastEnders writer Julie Wassmer’s cozy mystery series of the same, Whitstable Pearl stars Kerry Godliman (late of After Life but also, and perhaps more importantly, Taskmaster) as Pearl Nolan, a thirtysomething single mother who, when she’s not running what appears to be a wildly successful oyster restaurant, moonlights as a private detective. When a local oyster fisherman drowns, caught up in his own anchor line in the middle of the bay, a recently-widowed, tall, dark, and handsome Chief Inspector name Mike McGuire (Howard Charles, nearly unrecognizable after his recent turn as the mealy-mouthed Conductor in Shadow & Bone) decamps from London to take up the case… which, it turns out, was a case Pearl was already on, long before anyone turned up dead. Initially wary of each other’s interference, Pearl and DCI McGuire nevertheless grow to develop a begrudging respect (and possibly more) for one another as the case—and the season—wears on. That they’re absolutely bound for romance, I won’t make any promises; I haven’t read the books, and only two episodes were provided by Acorn for review. But I don’t think anyone who’s read even one cozy mystery and/or watched even one episode of any of television’s other plucky lady sleuth/stoic gentleman detective dramedies (Queens of Mystery, Pushing Daisies, both Fishers) will think it a stretch to assume that odds are in love’s eventual favor.
Or at least, you wouldn’t think it a stretch, until you turned on the first episode and find yourself having to squint through some solid Scandi-noir gloom just to catch them even maybe making eyes at each other. If the overall aesthetic of Wassmer’s books screams “seaside fun!” the aesthetic of the show screams “the ocean is a cold, briny mistress, and hell is the people who’d tell you otherwise.”
This grittiness (as background material provided for the press was keen to underscore) is absolutely by design. Optioned by Buccaneer Media (Marcella) with the explicit* goal of weaving some Scandi-flavored edge into Wassner’s cozier original vision, there was a reason it wasn’t TV-vet Wassner who producers Guy Hescott, Tony Wood and Anna Burns tapped to adapt Pearl’s Whitstable for the screen, but rather Norwegian filmmaker Øystein Karlsen (Dag, Lilyhammer). In Karlsen’s hands, the working fishing village of Whitstable—which is located just a few hours east of London and a few miles north of Canterbury—transforms from a quaint Kentish seaside community with a burgeoning gentrification problem to a Nordically shadowy den of double-crosses, secrets, and lies. But, you know—cozy!