Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Even by my out-there standards, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a very weird show. The BBC America series based on the books by Douglas Adams watches like an exercise in connecting things that shouldn’t belong. There are corgis, manic detectives, aggressive biker gangs, soul-sucking cults, secretive government plots, bloody battles, fake illnesses, and the underlying belief that every little element in the universe is connected in some way. It’s absolute madness, and I love it.
The series follows Samuel Barnett as the excitable Dirk Gently, a detective who solves crimes not by looking at evidence but by understanding the unseen connective thread running throughout the universe. If that doesn’t make sense to you now, the series isn’t going to explain itself any further. Most of Season 1 focused on Dirk struggling to recruit and help his universe-appointed assistant Todd (Elijah Wood), a pessimistic and down-on-his-luck man who wants nothing to do with the weird, rambling person constantly at his side. Along the way the duo meets a charmingly insecure security officer with OCD (Jade Eshete), a holistic assassin with a knack for bloody kills (Fiona Dourif), a former electrician who has more common sense than anyone else on this show (Mpho Koaho), and an anarchist group that survives off of consuming other people’s energy as they try to track down a missing woman. There’s always a lot going on in Dirk Gently, both when it comes to the internal lives of its characters and in the mysteries the series has to balance. However, the resulting off-the-walls tone watches like one of the truest adaptations to Adams’ work.
Dirk Gently never completely follows its source material. It prefers to run amuck a bit, inserting insane B-plot and quirky side characters as it goes. But the tone of the series is unmistakably that of Adams. It’s a whirlwind of weird that never gives its more sane characters a break yet still always remembers to have a heart. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I teared up at Elijah Wood’s big speech about his relationship with Dirk at the end of Season 1. (Though to be fair no other actor can make me consistently cry over over small internal moments like Wood.)
However, much like a well-paced comedy, that’s why I enjoy Dirk Gently so much. The show clearly has so much fun running around in its own insanity that when it finally decides to focus on something more emotional, those punches land. But more than that, it’s rare to see a show that’s willing to immerse itself so completely in sci-fi madness. Big budget sci-fi bets like Westworld and even some Star Trek episodes often spend so much time establishing the rules of their worlds, it feels tiring. You see the opposite in animation, where shows like Superjail! and Aqua Teen Hunger Force are so eager to get to the strange moments, they often ignore character development. Dirk Gently is an excellent middle ground — a show that’s willing to fully be a sci-fi drama while rarely if ever relying on hand-holding.
This isn’t to say that Dirk Gently is a perfect show. It can certainly be too zany for some viewers and its dialogue borders between smug and cutesy at times. It’s a series I recommend with caution, and audiences will love it or hate it from its very first episode. However, it’s worth taking a shot on. I’m firmly in the love it camp, especially since Season 2 is faster, smarter, and odder than ever before. Not only does this new season give the show’s many engaging side characters more room, but it also features a time or maybe dimension traveling subplot that I can’t wait to be further confused by. It’s a narrative mess that can only be unravelled through strings and cork boards, but it’s an intentional and fun one. If a fast-paced zany drama that watches like a more mature Doctor Who sounds appealing to you, you need to give Dirk Gently a shot.
New episodes of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency premiere on BBC America Saturdays at 9/8 C.
Stream Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Season 2 on BBC America
