The Underappreciated Keen Eddie

A sad truth about television is that series get canned for being too good. A lost favorite of mine is the hybrid Keen Eddie (2003), a comic cocktail of style, pace, cops and robbers, big heart, sharp sense of humor, and British send-up. 

And it got the hook after seven episodes. Thirteen, if you count the final six that Bravo burned in 2004. No streaming service carries it at last check. You can barely find it on YouTube.

Given all that, Keen Eddie needs a primer. 

The Premise

Eddie (Mark Valley) is a New York cop. He's clever--but not as clever as he thinks he is. He gets played and screws up a carefully arranged international drug bust. NYPD banishes Eddie to London to assist New Scotland Yard with that piece of the blown investigation. Could that ever actually happen? Bear with me.

Eddie clicks with new partner Monty Pippin (Julian Rhind-Tutt), an eccentric libertine, and they get about breaking cases. Thirteen of them. Meanwhile, Superintendent Johnson (Colin Salmon) comes to begrudge Eddie's dogged successes but never his American nonsense. Eddie's accidental roommate, Fiona (Sienna Miller), is running a support grift on her parents and angles to get Eddie out of her hair.

The Packaging

British humor doesn't scream pace (or it didn't in 2003), but the show solved that with slick packaging: dynamic editing, striking visuals, fast cutaways, Dutch angles tossed in for fun. A progressive techno soundtrack kept things bubbling. 

If that sounds pretentious, it wasn't. The show understood that its tongue must always be in its cheek, and the humor was as much London underworld class as highbrow. One moment, it was an awkward conversation with Fiona's wealthy parents or at a society gathering, the next the cops would be bartering with oddball street informants. Either, the dialogue zipped and zinged. 

Examples of crimes Eddie and Pippin investigated:

• A prize racehorse stolen for its sperm, but the thieves can't decide on who has to obtain the samples;
• Stolen football tickets;
• A safecracking where the thieves forget where they put the safe's operating manual.

The show also won a comic writer's hat tip for pulling something ever more rare: the running gag. As Eddie settled into his expat life, episodes revisited his dog's swath of destruction or his awkward flirtations with the Superintendent's assistant. In isolation, any one gag might've flopped, but none were in isolation. They were neat-fit parts of Keen Eddie's snow globe London.

That London was very much a major character, one that the producers took great lengths to make cool. Well, I did find it cool, but I'm their target Anglophile. I also think drizzle and banoffee pie are cool. 

The Players

And it was all meant to build those characters. If it was going to work, the casting had to be, as they say across the pond, spot on. The producers went for the pragmatic. In 2003, the main four characters were their own blend of established performers and emerging talents. Valley had made the rounds on soap operas and guest star slots. He had the charm to play a leading man, the presence to play a seasoned cop, the brashness to play a loose cannon, and the vulnerability to play a loose cannon all too aware of his mistakes. 

Julian Rhind-Tutt was an excellent foil. At the time, he was already respected in British theatre and television, not least for his comic gifts. He leaned into his libertine character with a refined, seen-some-things openness to life that contrasted well with Eddie's American need for closure. 

Colin Salmon was also by then a well-known actor in the U.K. He played the martinet Superintendent with firm smolder and British deadpan. 

The star just breaking out was Sienna Miller. She'd earned a name for herself as a model but was transitioning to acting. She played her character as a control freak and exasperated when control inevitably evades her. She's every bit the mistake maker as Eddie but can't process it with his self-deprecating shrug.

The Undoing

In 2002, Fox was American Idol and then everything else. Fox thought it was getting a high-concept cop show run by producers with a track record. And that was exactly the series turned over to them, but the network's feet had gone cold. Too concept, too British. In the end, Fox shunted Keen Eddie to the summer replacement line-up. From there, things went about how you might think.

Keen Eddie took over the Tuesday 9pm slot from 24, which had finished its second season and was growing its audience. The competition was Last Comic Standing (NBC), According to Jim (ABC), and The Guardian (CBS) riding in JAG's 8pm audience wake. Seven weeks was the extent of Fox's patience. They turned the slot over to a very different sort of premiere, The O.C.

In retrospect, the switch seems instructive. In 2002, few network viewers were tuning in for smart comedy, let alone when baked into a police procedural. The new golden age of TV was happening elsewhere, on paid cable--The Wire, The Sopranos, Sex in the City--and this was years before anyone uttered the word streaming.  

Keen Eddie was caught in the middle. A cop show with comedy, a comedy show with brains, an American show with too British a feel. It was good at everything but at finding a network audience. 

Which is a damn shame. Keen Eddie was a great show with a great perspective--that didn't take itself the least seriously. It was there to entertain and did so relentlessly. 

If only more of us had been watching those summer nights.