My other great genre love is mystery and crime, so of course I love TV shows with detectives, whether real-world or fantasy - and I'm going to do these in chronological order of the period setting, since I also love historical crime.
I'm starting with the Victorian/Edwardian series "Murdoch Mysteries" - another show I've been late to the party on. In fact if you read "The Dead Dragon Job" you could be forgiven for thinking it was inspired by this show, albeit with the genders of the main characters flipped, but honestly I was just tuned into the same classic tropes, and only started watching it after I finished the draft and needed something relaxing and reasonably period-appropriate to watch!
Next up is the delightful 1920s detective series, "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries". While Miss Fisher herself is an amateur sleuth, period-wise this is very close to my own books, so I love to watch it to pick up little details about the police of the period. Plus the costumes are gorgeous, and it has that Golden Age of Crime vibe that I love!
Skipping forward a few decades and we come to a show that's pretty nostalgic for me (because yes, I'm that old!) - Life on Mars, an old-school police procedural with a dash of fantasy, set in 1973.
It's quite an eye-opener for a modern audience, with its rampant sexism, racism and homophobia, but who could really dislike Gene Hunt, a man who may be a walking cliché, but who also embodies the gritty devotion to The Job that Sam is so badly missing in his sanitised 21st-century role. We rewatch this show (and its sequel, Ashes to Ashes) pretty regularly - it's just that good!
At last we come to the present day, or near enough! Leverage is yet another show I didn't discover until after it had been cancelled, whereupon I wondered where it had been all my life 😂
Thieves robbing the rich to help the poor? Check. Cool heists? Check. Charming, funny characters? Check. All this and Christian Kane too (another actor I've followed from show to show, starting with his role as lawyer Lindsey McDonald on "Angel")
Aaand we circle back to fantasy with Lucifer, a show that takes a Neil Gaiman character (from "The Sandman") and drops him into a classic "police detective with maverick civilian sidekick" scenario. It was fun on Fox, but Netflix really kicked it up a notch, with season arcs that moved along at a faster clip - and some rather saucy moments that wouldn't have made it onto network TV 😳
It's not really a direct inspiration for my books, but as the quintessential fantasy cop show, I couldn't really leave it out!
