None of the big med­ical shows on tele­vi­sion has suc­ceeded in gain­ing my seri­ous inter­est ― until now. I love this show. And what is most aston­ish­ing about it is that the grub­by, surly, sar­cas­tic, and extreme­ly Amer­i­can main char­ac­ter is played by Hugh Lau­rie, who played Bertie Woost­er in the Jeeves and Woost­er, and many hilar­i­ous char­ac­ters in the Black­ad­der series. Laurie’s Amer­i­can voice and man­ner are com­pletely con­vinc­ing. The series assumes the audi­ence has a rea­son­able knowl­edge of med­i­cine and phys­i­ol­ogy, and tack­les hard issues with­out slip­ping into the tire­some eva­sive­ness that Amer­i­can TV shows usu­ally get into when faced with real prob­lems. In this show, peo­ple decide things. Many thanks to Isaac White for bring­ing over four episodes of this show.

After about twen­ty min­utes of expe­ri­enc­ing Steven Spielberg’s “typ­i­cal Amer­i­can fam­i­ly”, which con­sists of an incred­i­bly bone-head­ed father, played by Tom Cruise, an annoy­ing, con­stant­ly screech­ing young daugh­ter, and a tire­some­ly surly son, I start­ed to root for the Mar­tians. I des­per­ate­ly hoped that the Mar­tians would turn them into blood slurpees. Actu­al­ly, the film doesn’t say they are Mar­tians; it would be impos­si­ble to log­i­cal­ly update Wells’ 1898 nov­el and have them com­ing from Mars. But wher­ev­er the aliens come from, they seem to have been able to build a tech­no­log­i­cal super-civ­i­liza­tion with­out know­ing the germ the­o­ry of dis­ease. The 1953 Byron Hask­ins adap­ta­tion, star­ring Gene Bar­ry, was a lot more fun.

The 1994–1996 tele­vi­sion movies based on Ellis Peters’ medieval mur­der mys­ter­ies are very well done. The pro­duc­tion val­ues are mod­est, but do their job. What makes it all work is the act­ing skill of Derek Jaco­bi, who becomes the char­ac­ter so thor­ough­ly that that when I read one of the nov­els I could­n’t help but hear his voice and see his face. He has cre­at­ed one of the most lik­able char­ac­ters on tele­vi­sion. Monk’s Hood has all the ele­ments that Ellis Peters likes to play with: the inter­play of local and king­dom pol­i­tics, the ambi­gu­i­ty of the Church being both inside and out­side the soci­ety, the no-man’s-land between the Welsh and Eng­lish, and, of course, flow­ers and herbs. The monk’s hood, by the way is a par­tic­u­lar­ly pret­ty flower.