Bodkin was a great series that failed to stick the landing .
I have always been a fan of Will Forte.He and Jason Sudeikis have this way of being the audience in their shows and movie. I find it endearing. With Forte there is always a bit of darkness about it and he plays it so straight so it relies on you as the audience member to both suspend disbelief and also appreciate the irony of the situation at the same time.
Bodkin is a charming whodunnit that modernizes the genre using the newer occupation of podcaster as the vehicle to tell the story about a 20 year old mystery that some people would prefered would stay in the past. A trio of investigators left by Forte also includes Siobhan Cullen as Dove and Robyn Cara as Emma. The three descend upon the coastal village of Bodkin located in the Republic of Ireland. They all have different agendas, with Dove and Gilbert's being the most disparate. Dove wants to discover the truth while Gilbert wants to wallow in it. Emma is probably the most chaotic in terms of trying to serve the other two and flipping between them until she choosesto be part of the story in the end.
Overall I really liked the way the show was shot and the way it modernized they tried and true formula. I found some aspects to be a bit ridiculous but acceptable.
What I found was that there was very little emotional payoff at the end. I found Gilbert's choice to essentially abandon what was quite likely the most exciting story of his life to be a weird choice given he has no other means to support himself. I found Dove's arc to be too saccharin and melodramatic in tone to match the chaos that he choices create throughout the series.
Only Emma's end was internally logical to me.
I get the feeling that they wanted an end to the story that would be satisfactory if they didn't get a second season but they wanted to leave enough mystery in case Netflix decided to do that. Maybe this would have been better on Apple TV as they seem to have a better idea of how to manage multi season episodic series.
Overall it was a fun show but had a lot more potential had it worked harder to stick the landing.
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