What would Sherlock Holmes have been without John Watson? Acorn TV, the premier streaming destination for British mysteries and dramas, recently posed this type of question during a TCA panel about three of their new shows, all of which feature dynamic partnerships. If you’re a fan of British mysteries, you won’t want to miss The Chelsea Detective, Harry Wild, and Recipes for Love and Murder. Here’s what we learned from the cast of each show.
The Chelsea Detective (Steve Schofield), Harry Wild (Szymon Lazewski/Zoe Productions DAC/AcornTV), Recipes for Love and Murder (Acorn TV)
The Chelsea Detective
Premiering today, The Chelsea Detective follows DI Max Arnold (Adrian Scarborough) and DS Priya Shamsie (Sonita Henry) as they solve crimes on the dark side of posh and wealthy Chelsea. “I remember when I booked the show, and my reps were saying, ‘Oh, you should probably watch a lot of crime partner shows,’” Sonita Henry revealed about the casting process. “I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to base my character on any other character that had been there before. I wanted my and Adrian’s relationship to dictate how Max and Priya got along. And I think that comes across in the show.”
“We had a really marvelous time on The Chelsea Detective, Adrian Scarborough shared. “I think there's just something very wonderful about the writing on the show. And there's something about the English sense of humor which is quite dry and droll on it, I think, which I really, really like. And it means that we can have a bit of a dry laugh together, even though there's something as serious as murder in the pipeline.”
Harry Wild
Premiering on April 4th, Harry Wild follows Harriet “Harry” Wild (Jane Seymour), a retiring university literature professor who, after getting mugged by Fergus Reid (Rohan Nedd), ends up partnering with the teen so help solve a murder her son is investigating. “Dave Logan, who is British, wrote this and conceived it, and Jo Spain, who is Irish and a very famous mystery writer, and now the two of them, they worked together on Harry Wild,” Jane Seymour explained, who also serves as an executive producer on the show. “I'm playing an English professor, so I spend the whole time correcting everyone's grammar, deciphering terrible murders from my knowledge of English literature and history and the rest of it. And Rohan, who plays my sidekick, who quit school and doesn't wanna learn anything, I'm getting him through his schoolwork while he's teaching me how to be street smart, which clearly I'm not. But the fun part was that my character does go undercover quite a lot, so sometimes she's Irish, sometimes she's Scots, sometimes she's a harmless little old lady.”
“There were a lot of similarities between the relationship between Fergus and Harry and the relationship between myself and Jane, noting that the first time I met Jane, I stole from her,” Rohan Nedd laughed. “Jane has been in the game for so long. She knows so much about how to do the job well that when I first met her, I was learning so much just as Fergus learns from Harry. I was learning from Jane an awful lot every single day. So I feel like all the things that are happening off-screen with her, teaching me about incredible ways to act better and just be better and all the stuff that was going on onscreen with the mysteries being solved. We got very close, and there's a familial kind of love there between us.”
Recipes for Love and Murder
Acorn TV subscribers will have to wait until this fall for Recipes for Love and Murder, a series adaptation of Sally Andrew’s A Tannie Maria Mystery novels about advice columnist Maria Purvis (Maria Doyle Kennedy) who partners with rookie journalist Jessie September (Kylie Fisher) when one of her longtime correspondents from her column is murdered. Set in South Africa and filmed around Cape Town, Maria Doyle Kennedy found herself relying on her costar Kylie Fisher, who hails from the region. “I really kind of relied on her,” she explained. “Like, I felt like an outsider for a while, and I really kind of relied on her to settle me in and make me feel at home. And although we started off kind of in competition in our series together, we were adversaries at the beginning because we were both sort of competing for the same job in our local newspaper. And then, eventually, just despite ourselves, we can't help coming together and, well, we really did that like in real life.”
“Food was such a big part of our show, but it’s also a very big part of how South Africans communicate and have connection and have a relationship with people, so it was lovely that that was something that bonded us all,” Kylie Fisher shared. “There is three of us from three different walks of lives, and it wasn’t centered around romance, and it wasn’t centered around anything else but true friendship and true sisterhood. And they’re very different people, but they come together to solve something so pivotal in their community, and they really, in the end, have such beautiful relationships on and offscreen, so loved it, loved every minute of it, the set and all.”
The only place to see The Chelsea Detective, Harry Wild, and Recipes for Love and Murder is on Acorn TV, but you can get a brief preview at all of these exciting mysteries in the video below.