3 out of 5

Creator: Neil Cross

An overwrought and overacted season 1 sheds most of its forced cleverness for a much more effective and better written season 2.  Idris Elba plays the anger-prone John Luther, DSI for the Brits, using his mumbled about genius deductive skills to solve the tough cases.  From the first minutes of episode one, we’re shown the possible aftermath of John’s lashing outs, as the possibility that his lack of empathy toward a pursued pedophile may have prevented him from taking action to save the criminal from a coma-inducing fall… one of several front-loaded plot elements that’s stuffed in early on, along with wife problems and the killer he can’t catch – Alice Morgan – who ends up becoming his cat-and-mouse confidante, two sides of a genius coin.  The problem with this is that John isn’t painted much as a likeable character, his character ‘hook’ – the angry flashes – responsible for other plot hooks, making the premise a bit shaky and the Luther character hindered from seeming like a real person, which becomes apparent in Idris’ inability to really sink into the role.  …Until season 2, which smartly, essentially, resets events and picks and chooses the right elements to proceed, turning a soapy-drama-disguised-as-cop-show into a proper police procedural, the crimes more frightening, and John’s team all coming into their own as realized assets and characters.  It still opts for a bit of drawn out overkill when concluding the cases, but its a much stronger step in a good direction, leveraging a talented stable of actors properly (Elba is great at the more reserved version of Luther) and ditching the wikipedia-fact-of-the-month-that-i’ll-use-to-unconvingcingly-solve-this-crime trick from season 1.  Thankfully, the whole way through things have been well shot and mostly well written (just conceptually flawed at outset), making it enjoyable to sit and watch where things go.