BBC America’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency ran for two seasons and 18 episodes, from October 22, 2016, to December 16, 2017. It was created and primarily written by Max Landis, adapted from Douglas Adams’ novel series of the same name, and it was cancelled after the second-season finale. That is a short life for a show this strange, and the strangeness is the point.
Trailer, via BBC America.
Samuel Barnett as the Holistic Detective
The premise is Douglas Adams by way of a detective procedural. Dirk Gently, played by Samuel Barnett, calls himself a “holistic detective” and investigates obscure cases based on the inter-connectivity of all things. He does not solve cases by conventional means. He follows fate.
Barnett plays him as excitable and optimistic, a mask over loneliness and insecurity. It is a performance that has to hold two things at once — the joke and the sadness under it — and the show works best when it lets him do both.
Elijah Wood is Todd Brotzman, the reluctant sidekick. Todd is a bellhop who spends all his money to help his sister Amanda afford treatment for pararibulitis, a fictional disease invented for the show that causes vivid and painful hallucinations. He claims to have been cured of it. He lied. He has lied to and stolen from everyone he has ever cared about.
That is a real character, not a sidekick gag, and Wood plays the shame of it without asking for sympathy.
Farah Black, Bart Curlish, and Project Blackwing
The ensemble is where the show spends its ambition. Hannah Marks is Amanda, who later joins the Rowdy 3, a group that helps her manage her hallucinations. Jade Eshete is Farah Black, a tough security officer with obsessive-compulsive disorder who is determined to solve the case after her millionaire boss is killed and his daughter kidnapped.
Then there is Fiona Dourif as Bart Curlish, a “holistic assassin” who believes the universe leads her to people she has to kill and will not let her die. She feels she must hunt “Dirk Gently” despite not knowing who or what he is.
A “holistic” assassin who believes that the universe leads her to people she has to kill, and that it won’t allow her to die.
Dirk’s past is linked to “Project Blackwing”, a secret CIA project to evaluate subjects with strange abilities. He is mildly psychic. Blackwing agents want him back. Bart wants him dead, or thinks she does.
Seattle, Bergsberg, and a Vancouver Shoot
Season one is set in Seattle, Washington. Season two moves to the fictional town of Bergsberg, Montana. Filming primarily took place in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The first season ran eight episodes, premiering October 22, 2016, and concluding December 10, 2016. All episodes went to Netflix outside the United States on December 11, 2016. BBC America renewed the show for a 10-episode second season on November 21, 2016. That season premiered October 14, 2017.
The series is co-produced and distributed by BBC America and Netflix, along with AMC Studios, Ideate Media and IDW Entertainment. That is a lot of hands on one property, and the second season’s sprawl shows it.
What Bergsberg Does to the Show
The move to Montana is the show’s biggest swing. Seattle gave season one a rainy, urban spine. Bergsberg gives season two a closed town, a bigger cast, and a plot that keeps adding pieces.
Mpho Koaho’s Ken, an electronics technician, and Dustin Milligan’s Sergeant Hugo Friedkin, Tyler Labine’s Sherlock Hobbs, Amanda Walsh’s Suzie Boreton, Tony Amendola’s Arnold Cardenas, Izzie Steele’s Tina Tevetino and Agam Darshi’s Wakti Wapnasi all crowd into the frame.
Some of it lands. Some of it is noise dressed as mystery. The show’s central bet — that everything is connected — is also its central risk, because a plot that connects everything can excuse anything.
The Case for 18 Episodes and No More
Here is the thing worth saying plainly: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was cancelled too early and also exactly on time. The first season is the tighter piece, a clean eight-episode run with a real case and a real friendship at the middle of it. The second season is more ambitious and less controlled, and the finale leaves the story where a third season would have had to pick it up. It never got one.
What survives is Barnett and Wood. The show’s best idea is not the interconnected universe — plenty of shows have that — but the pairing of a man who trusts fate completely with a man who has spent his life lying to everyone. Dirk follows the universe. Todd follows Dirk. Neither one is a plan.
The pararibulitis thread is the show’s sharpest invention and its cruelest. A disease that causes vivid and painful hallucinations is a very good metaphor for a detective who solves crimes by believing things that are not obviously true. The show knows this. It does not overexplain it.
The Numbers
- Score: 7.7/10 (TMDB audience score, 939 votes)
- Network: BBC America; distributed with Netflix
- Created by: Max Landis, from Douglas Adams’ novels
- Run: 2 seasons, 18 episodes
- First aired: October 22, 2016
- Last aired: December 16, 2017
- Season 1: 8 episodes, concluded December 10, 2016
- Season 2: 10 episodes, premiered October 14, 2017
- Filmed primarily in Vancouver, British Columbia
- Status: cancelled after the second-season finale
Where This Leaves the Show
The 7.7/10 figure is TMDB’s audience score across 939 votes, not a critic’s rating. It is not a great show, and it is not a forgettable one. It is a show with a genuinely original lead performance, a real emotional engine in Todd and Amanda, and a mythology it never got to finish.
The cancellation is the part that stings. The second season ends mid-stride, and the Project Blackwing thread — the CIA, the subjects, the question of what Dirk actually is — is left open. That is not a cliffhanger the show earned so much as one it was handed.
Watch the first season. Watch the second for Dourif’s Bart, who is the show’s strangest and most complete creation, and for the Bergsberg cast, which is larger than the plot can hold. Skip nothing, but know that the ending is not an ending. Some shows are cancelled. This one was interrupted.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.