Van der Valk

 

This may be a little circular, so bear with me.  I’ve been watching Van der Valk, streaming on PBS Masterpiece, and after a somewhat shaky start, it’s grown on me.  Other viewers have had a similar reaction, but in all honesty, it seems to be us, and not the show.

For one, this is the second time around for a Van der Valk adaption.  Nicolas Freeling wrote the books, originally, killed the guy off after ten, and then brought him back for a swan song seventeen years later.  (Might remind you of Doyle having to revive Holmes, after throwing him over the Reichenbach Falls.)  In the event, after publishing the first ten novels, Freeling put together a TV series, which ran intermittently for five seasons – weirdly, 1972 and ‘73, ‘77, and then 1991 and ‘92.  Why this odd stutter and stop is anybody’s guess.  It’s a Brit production, primarily studio shot at Thames Television, but with some Amsterdam location shooting.  Van der Valk is played by Barry Foster. 

Barry Foster.  The first thing you’d probably remember him from is Hitchcock’s Frenzy (1972), the hero’s best mate, who turns out to be – well, no, I won’t give it away.  He’d been working steadily since 1954, mostly in television, so he wasn’t an ingenue, if he wasn’t yet established.  He’d done a very solid Peter Yates heist picture, and he was in Battle of Britain, along with everybody else in the UK film industry, although he never got legs.  His own comment was that people often mistook him for John Thaw, Inspector Morse, or Jon Pertwee, famously the Third Doctor – “I attribute a great deal of my success to being confused with them” – but in ‘82, he got a part that he absolutely crushed, Sir Saul Enderby, head of Circus, in Smiley’s People, opposite Alec Guinness.  Somehow steely and smarmy at the same time, a resolute bootlicker and a condescending snake, a chilly survivor of Whitehall political battles, the kind of guy who’d cut your nuts off with a smile, and leave the mess for somebody else to clean up.  No more than a cameo, but an aftertaste as bitter as hemlock. 

So, we’ve got this loyal fan base, nostalgic for the Barry Foster version.  That would appear to be one strike.  The leads of the new Van der Valk are Marc Warren and Maimie McCoy.  Maimie was the villainess, Milady, in The Musketeers, an admittedly juvenile swashbuckler I have a soft spot for; Marc Warren was Albert Blithe, in three episodes of Band of Brothers, a character I found hugely off-putting.  This is two strikes, because the negatives for the one actor outweigh the positives for the other.  I can’t rationally explain this, either.  I have a friend who took a dislike to Forest Whitaker, not for any intrinsic reason, but because he took issue with the characterization of Charlie Parker in Bird.  It’s taken me six episodes, so far, to get over my antipathy to Marc Warren, which seems ridiculous.  Then again, he plays the character in an unsympathetic way.  This is yet another complaint, that you see in the reviews, that the leads don’t have chemistry.  This isn’t quite right.  They have a very definite chemistry, but you have to feel it out, because both their characters are closed off.  Not just once burned, twice shy - a miscommunication, something you could talk through - but a chemical imbalance, on the spectrum.  They seem wired at cross-purposes. 

You’re asking, What do I like about the show?  Curiously, all of the above.  I went into it with a chip on my shoulder, needing to be won over, and they convinced me to stick around.  It’s supposedly about Dutch cops, whereas the lead cast are Brits, some support from local actors and crew; shot entirely on location, plenty of Amsterdam, with canals, tulips, windmills, polders, and so on.  Cars are left-hand drive, bars are open all night, gender is fluid, people mind their own business, and not yours, so much.  It doesn’t have that UK vibe. 

The more important, or practical part, is the team, and their approach to the canvas.  Like any show about a cop shop, from Barney Miller on, your willingness to negotiate the relationship depends on your feeling for the structural dynamic, how the cops themselves manage their behaviors, the office politics, the risk assessments.  How far do they trust one another?  Is it convincing?  One of the cooler things about Van der Valk is that the dynamic isn’t static, there are no fixed orbits. 

As for the plots, you might find yourself thinking less could be more.  The mysteries are sometimes over-busy and contrived; then again, the characters can surprise you.  I find the show more satisfying as it builds a wider interior world, even as personal isolation becomes the sure result.  These people are separate, and inarticulate, an existential flaw.  It makes them seem all the more genuine. 

I said I meant to circle.  It’s a metaphor for how I got to like Van der Valk.  I let it sneak up on me.