BODKIN, REVIEW: ENJOYABLY MADCAP TAKE ON OUR TRUE-CRIME PODCAST OBSESSION
A period of true-crime obsession combined with the apogee of the podcast has led us inexorably to a wave of true-crime podcast satires. Everything that once seemed deathly serious is soon ripe for parody. Which is why everyone gabbing on about Serial or The Jinx could only lead to Only Murders in the Building or Black Mirror’s recent Loch Henry episode.
Bodkin, a new Netflix drama, finds itself very much in what I’ll call the third wave of True Crime-ism, which is the one where we’re allowed to say: “Isn’t this all a bit silly?” Its set-up is very much Only Murders in the Building, so long as that Building is in West Cork: three unlikely podcasters head to the fictional Irish coastal town of Bodkin to investigate the disappearance of three strangers 25 years ago.
Naturally, our starring trio are a mismatched crew. Gilbert (Will Forte) is a tiggerish American podcaster who thinks rural Ireland is all craic and slainte; Dove (Siobhán Cullen) is a Dublin-born investigative journalist currently working in London who thinks true-crime podcasting is barrel-scraping journalism; Emmy (Robyn Cara) is their wide-eyed researcher. Dove – reeling from a whistleblower case where her source hanged himself – is none too happy to be back in Ireland, and certainly not back there with a grinning American chancer.
These are not the most promising beginnings. At the start, Bodkin feels both over-familiar (fish-out-of-water, small town with secrets) as well as forced. The only reason, for example, that our team would conceivably not have hired a car to get around a place they don’t know is so that they can meet local taxi driver Sean, who happens to be a key part of the plot.
However, once our trio are in Bodkin and you forget about what brought them there (ie the requirements of television drama), the show really hits its straps. It has that sense of low-level anarchy, both in what it portrays – pagan rituals, mad locals, a community held together by trust and family more than law and order – and in the way it portrays it. Writer Jez Scharf throws everything at the wall with absurdist relish, including secret children, sensationally negligent policing, yoga nuns, server farms, Semtex and eels. Not all, but a good deal of it, sticks.
It helps, of course, that the West Cork setting would be watchable even as a screensaver, but the performances are the real glue. Cullen was superb in The Dry and deserves top billing in whatever she does next for her hard-nosed hack Dove. Forte, a Saturday Night Live alumni, starts out as a gleaming-toothed game-show host but by the end is a more interesting figure. Even the podcast-style voiceovers that are dotted throughout, laden with the kind of daft rhetorical questions podcasters use to fill space, ends up being both pleasingly parodical as well as a part of the story. Bodkin certainly isn’t perfect, but its mayhem is infectious. There’s no crime in that.
Bodkin is on Netflix from Thursday 9 May
2024-05-07T19:01:59Z dg43tfdfdgfd