The Daily Beast: "Oxford's No. 1 Sleuth: Inspector Lewis's Kevin Whately on Morse, John Thaw, and the End of the Series"

Kevin Whately has been playing gruff, sensible detective Robbie Lewis on Morse and Lewis for 26 years. I speak to him about the possible end of the Oxford copper.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Oxford's No. 1 Sleuth: Inspector Lewis's Kevin Whately on Morse, John Thaw, and the End of the Series," in which I speak with Kevin Whately, star of Inspector Morse and Lewis (which returns to PBS' Masterpiece Mystery on Sunday) about playing Robbie Lewis for 26 years, whether this is the end for the Oxford-set drama, and what's next.

Inspector Lewis is due for a vacation.

After more than 20 years playing Detective Inspector Robert “Robbie” Lewis, actor Kevin Whately has earned a well-deserved break from investigating murders beneath the Oxford spires. Introduced in Inspector Morse’s first episode (“The Dead of Jericho”), Whately’s Robbie Lewis was the Geordie sidekick of the late John Thaw’s erudite and perpetually cranky Inspector Morse before becoming the lead of his own spinoff, Lewis.

While Whately has a slew of roles on his résumé—he also starred in British drama Peak Practice and comedy Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, as well as countless other projects, including The English Patient—Robbie Lewis is the role still most closely associated with the 62-year-old actor. He has played the gruff detective from 1987 to 2000 on Morse and from 2006 to the present on Inspector Lewis.

The much loved show returns for its sixth (or seventh, if you’re going by the ITV ordering), and possibly final, season on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery on Sunday, a season that finds Lewis and his partner, Cambridge-educated Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), grappling with change, uncertainty, and possibly even a happy ending of sorts.

The Daily Beast caught up with Whately earlier this month during his protracted hiatus from Inspector Lewis to discuss the challenges of playing a role for more than two decades, the romance between Robbie Lewis and medical examiner Laura Hobson (Clare Holman), why he tried to turn down Lewis, and what’s next for the Oxford sleuth.

You've been extremely outspoken about your need for a potential hiatus from the series. What are the challenges of playing Robbie Lewis for 26 years?

Kevin Whately: Every now and then, you suddenly realize you've asked the same question probably 50 times before: “Where were you last night?” We have wonderful writers, but you can't think of a different way to do it, or a different corner to come out of, and you do need a break. I've just recently worked out that I haven't had a summer off for 31 years, which is half my life. So I want a year off for real. And it happened to coincide with Laurence [Fox] saying he wanted to come over and do pilot season over here, but he's actually doing a lot of fathering instead.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Daily Beast: "Morse Code: PBS' Knife-Sharp Lewis Returns"

Murder among the dreaming spires? I explore the enduring charms of Masterpiece Mystery’s Oxford-set crime drama Inspector Lewis, which returns to PBS for a fifth season on Sunday.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Morse Code: PBS' Knife-Sharp Lewis Returns," in which I take a look at both Inspector Lewis and Endeavour from within the context of the legacy of Morse and their role within what I'm calling an Oxford crime trilogy.

In a television landscape populated by countless iterations of CSI and its ilk—crime dramas where the emphasis is on forensics as crime-solving technology rather than in old school policing—Masterpiece Mystery’s delightful Inspector Lewis may feel like an odd man out. But in the case of Lewis, which returns to PBS on Sunday for a fifth season (or sixth, if you’re going by the U.K.’s numbering system), that’s a good thing indeed.

The show, based on characters created by Colin Dexter, is now itself a long-running spinoff of the long-running mystery drama Inspector Morse, which featured John Thaw as the titular detective—wary of authority and enamored of opera, real English beer, and his Jaguar—who was ceremoniously killed off in 2000. (Thaw himself, who played Morse between 1987 and 2000, died in real life in 2002.) And last Sunday saw the American broadcast of the pilot episode of a new spinoff, Endeavour, which stars Shaun Evans as a young version of Morse, an Oxford dropout who returns to the spired city in 1965 as an inexperienced police constable, where he runs afoul of his commanders in pursuit of the killer of a 15-year-old local girl. (Endeavour has been recommissioned by ITV for four feature-length episodes, but no decision has yet been made by WGBH’s Masterpiece Mystery about its future Stateside.)

Morse’s partner from the original series, Kevin Whately’s Robbie Lewis, was promoted to Detective Inspector and his own show in 2006. Like its predecessor, Lewis revolves around police investigators attempting to solve murders in Oxford, where town and gown sit uncomfortably side by side. In Lewis, the gruff Robbie Lewis—widowed after a hit-and-run driver killed his wife—is joined by the reserved, erudite Detective Sergeant James Hathaway (Laurence Fox), a Cambridge-educated copper who dropped out of the seminary to pursue police work.

Rather than follow the conventions of the chalk-and-cheese pair of cops who are constantly rubbing each other the wrong way, Lewis and Hathaway have settled into a comfortable amiability. Lewis’ existence—microwaved dinners eaten standing up, an ongoing simmering flirtation with forensic pathologist Dr. Laura Hobson (Clare Holman)—underscores a haunting loneliness, an unwilling return to bachelorhood in the face of loss.

In many respects, Hathaway is more similar to Morse than to Lewis: he’s knowledgeable about the finer things in life—poetry, philosophy, mythology—and the mysteries of religion. In Oxford, where the suspects are often university students or dons, it pays to have a partner who knows a thing or two about Nietzsche or Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. (Yet Hathaway is shifty and awkward around women, an issue that Morse, who frequently engaged in some rather spectacularly inappropriate flirtations with female suspects and witnesses, never had.)

But it’s the Lewis Carroll expertise that plays a role in this Sunday’s episode, “The Soul of Genius,” which revolves around a series of murders related to Carroll’s monolithic nonsense poem, which itself is about the quest to find something inconceivable and unknowable. In Carroll’s poem, the seekers fade away into nothingness once they capture their quarry; in a show that’s essentially a police procedural about the apprehension of murderers, that’s a weighty existential statement about Lewis and Hathaway’s own purpose. The Snark, within both Carroll’s narrative and that of Lewis, becomes itself an emblem of obsession, with multiple characters attempting to find hidden meaning in the cryptic clues embedded within the text.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...