TV Rewind: If You Need a Dose of Quiet Minimalism (and You Do), Watch Detectorists
Photo Courtesy of BBC Four
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
If you are overwhelmed with the current state of the world but know that apathy is not the answer—if you struggle to turn off your antennae, much less your laptop—then at least spare a couple hours for a BBC comedy that lets the cheap theater of the political and the material world fade into the background, and instead spends its time in the examination of human beings.
In classic British fashion, Detectorists ran for 19 episodes over three seasons, and it wasn’t a sure thing that the final season would even happen. The Brits seem to know when to let things go, and by November 2017, long before I had ever heard of it, Detectorists had come and gone. When it was recommended to me earlier this year, I was intrigued by the presence of Mackenzie Crook, the actor who played the sad gasbag Gareth on The Office, another piece of comedy perfection that never saw a twentieth episode. Crook wrote and directed all of Detectorists, and stars as an aspiring archaeologist named Andy Stone. Stone is no Gareth—he’s humble and sad and enduring, his gaunt features put to abiding, weary use—and behind the camera Crook demonstrates a brimming humanity that is hard to call anything but artistic brilliance.
The entire series runs for less than 10 hours, and I promise you that if it connects, you’ll complete it in roughly that amount of time. The strange word in the title, detectorists, made me think of crime and mysteries, but in fact it’s a reference to metal detector hobbyists. That describes the two main characters, Stone and his older friend Lance Stater (the superlative Toby Jones), and the genius of the show is inextricable from the performances of these leads. They are birds of a feather, slightly melancholic, slightly disappointed by life, but delighting in minutiae and especially the minutiae of history. Their resilience isn’t based on the belief that anything good will happen to them in the present—Lance operates a forklift moving produce while Andy does agency work and makes halting attempts to get his degree—but rather, good comes in the bounty of history. It’s a belief in magic. As Lance puts it, metal detecting “is as close as you’ll get to time travel.” The past is where they choose to live, at least in fantasy, all while the present encroaches in ways they’re ill-equipped to handle.