You’ve probably seen David Mitchell before, even if you’re not entirely sure where. Maybe you’ve watched him in the acclaimed British sitcom Peep Show, the Mitchell & Webb sketches that have been immortalized as online memes, or clips from any of the British panel shows on which he’s become a staple. Perhaps you’ve even read one of his books (he is not David Mitchell the novelist, but he does write books) or columns in The Guardian, or maybe you’ve seen him on a YouTube soapbox. Regardless of your level of familiarity, you’ve definitely never seen him solve a murder.
Ludwig, which premieres on BritBox March 20, seeks to correct this, casting Mitchell as John Taylor, a reclusive puzzle-maker who lifts his pen name from a vinyl cover of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. After John’s identical twin brother, a police detective named James, disappears, he surreptitiously takes his place at the station in an effort to find out what happened. The six-part series premiered last year in the U.K. to glowing reviews and ratings high enough to merit a season-two renewal and discussion of an American remake.
As a puzzle expert, John is wildly adept at solving the sorts of whodunits that happen on a cozy British murder show like this: stories light on violence but heavy on wit and ambience in which all the suspects are bunched together in a manor house or office building. And Mitchell is perfectly cast in a role seemingly built to suit his usual fussy, pedantic schtick. In a conversation over Zoom about his work, the show, the state of the world, and the economics of British television, Mitchell did insist on a key difference between himself and his character. “I’m fundamentally an extrovert, or I wouldn’t have chosen a career that involves appearing in front of people as my job,” he said. “But obviously, I’m not kidding myself that it’s a transformative performance.”
This show has already been a big success in the U.K. Was that a surprise for you?
Obviously, you never know. We thought we were onto something good, but the response exceeded my expectations. All the TV shows I’ve done before, really — whether it’s Peep Show or Would I Lie to You? or Upstart Crow — have been well-received, but they’ve taken months or years for people to notice them. But with Ludwig, I had a lot of people coming up to me saying “I’m really enjoying that” within days of the show being broadcast. So that was new for me. That was how I imagine television used to be in the 1980s.
What drew you to it in the first place? It’s not based on a book or any established IP. What a bold risk to take in this day and age!
I love the genre of detective shows; that’s my go-to area as a viewer. Because I’ve been involved in comedy for so long, watching it always feels slightly like work, and that spoils it a bit. Maybe I’ve now spoiled detective shows for myself. But I’ve always found them intriguing, relaxing, atmospheric. So for years I’d thought I would love to play a TV detective.
But yes, it’s a new idea that’s not based on something, and there’s precious little of that being made at the moment. I think we’re going through a period of tremendously low confidence in new ideas in popular culture, and that’s depressing.
I also loved your book Unruly. You have such a great insight into British culture. What do you think makes the British particularly good at cozy murder shows?
I think they play very much to the British sensibilities of nostalgia but laced with a sense of darkness and betrayal. For example, you take something like Miss Marple or Poirot or Inspector Morse — they’re all set in different versions of a beautiful, slightly false view of Britain. Most places don’t look like Oxford, where Morse is set. The Art Deco world of Poirot has long since been concreted over by some ’70s town planners, and the Miss Marple chintzy rural drawing room is not a place that many people frequent. So they’re all slightly false, chocolate-boxy views of England. I don’t think we are uncynical enough to just enjoy that, so there has to be something there to darken it, to twist it, to make it feel like there’s a bit of grit in the oyster, and that’s murder. That becomes the perfect relaxing, nostalgic, and enjoyable escapist show because it’s got enough darkness and nastiness and puzzlement to make us feel like that’s okay to watch. It’s not just a complete rose-tinted mirage.
It’s similar in that there’s not much overt violence, but otherwise, how do you see Ludwig in that canon as far as what type of England it depicts?
It’s set in Cambridge, the direction and design team did very well on a not-enormous budget making the show look nice, and they’ve got the use of Beethoven in the score. So it’s got an aesthetically pleasing heritage feel, but with a bit of a contemporary twist in the looks of the police station. It’s supposed to be a bit easy on the eye, and we are not confronting people with the depths of human depravity. You just go, “Okay, someone’s been murdered.” And then, “Let’s not dwell on what that means, but just on who did it.”
What I hope Ludwig also brings is a bit more comedy. I think through comedy you can reflect differently on society. My character is a fish out of water thrust into a police station, where he couldn’t be less happy to be. Because of that, you essentially allow the show to satirize crime shows. You see a lot of John’s early attempts to assimilate himself in this police station, and he’s only seen police stations through cop shows and murder shows. So a lot of the conventions of that can be made fun of in a nice way by seeing that world through his ignorant eyes.
I’ve always been fascinated with the way your comedy plays with your relationship to authority. You have this persona that likes hierarchy but also mocks it or is cynical about it. Is the fact that John is not an actual police officer important to you for the sake of that dynamic?
I think I would’ve been less drawn to a story where I was just being a police officer. There are so many programs about people who are police officers and usually investigating crimes that are actually quite unusual. I think one of the things I loved about this idea is that the unusualness of the type of crime he’s investigating is signaled by the unusualness of his own circumstances. I’d feel a bit self-conscious trying to be a normal working detective in an inner-city police station dealing with crimes. I’d want there to be an interesting or comic reason why he is a policeman.
Also, it does amuse me that even though the stakes aren’t always portrayed as being that high, what John is doing throughout this show is committing a very serious crime. He’s impersonating a police officer, and he’s got absolutely no defense. Every so often, he remembers this and absolutely panics. Because ultimately, as much as he doesn’t want to get caught for that, on another level, he thinks, Well, there’s nothing magical about being a police officer. It’s just another person, isn’t it?
There are only six episodes, and in the U.S., recently, it seems seasons are getting shorter across the board. Do you wish there were more episodes of this?
We’ve always made things, by American standards, in tiny quantities, and it’s fundamentally because we’ve never had the resources to make huge long series. To make something like The West Wing, you’ve got to really throw money at it, you’ve got to get a huge team of writers, they’ve all got to be writing at once, and there’s got to be agreement about the overall arc. You’ve got to wrest the idea from its originator and say, “You have to give away a lot of this writing work.” And the way you persuade them to do that is you say, “But no, we elevate you into showrunner! And because of that you’ll be happy to give this away!” In Britain, we don’t do that. It’s like the elves and the shoemaker: There isn’t enough leather to make more than six pairs of shoes.
What is your relationship to your American fan base? Do you get recognized over here?
I haven’t been to America for a while, but I certainly didn’t feel recognized there. I last went to New York before COVID, and at one point, someone came up to me and said, “I really like Peep Show.” I’m sure there are lots of individual Americans who’ve seen my stuff on the internet, but I don’t think that means I’m very likely to bump into any of them in the street. But I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.
There’s been talk of an American Peep Show remake. You’re not involved with that, are you?
No. The last I heard, it wouldn’t be a remake, really; it’d be inspired by it with the interior monologues and the POV thing, but with two women in the lead roles. And that seemed like it was going well, and I think they were making a pilot, but I haven’t heard anything since then.
You’re such a staple of the panel-show circuit in the U.K. Have you watched any of the American panel shows? Do you think that’s a format that could catch on here?
I haven’t watched any of the American panel shows, to be honest. It’s puzzled me for years why it’s a genre that doesn’t exist in the same way over there. But I have a theory about why it’s not caught on in America. I have no direct experience of working in American TV, so I might be dead wrong, but firstly, you have a big tradition of chat shows. They’re much bigger than here, so that is an outlet for a lot of new comedians and a big role for the panel shows taken by another genre of TV.
The other reason is that panel shows are, by their definition, slapdash. They come from a tradition of giving it a go, tidying it up in the edit, and hoping that that’ll do. And from that, you get two sorts of programs at different times. You get things that aren’t as good as other TV in a way that’s disappointing and then you get other moments when they just fly in a way no one could have invented. And that’s, for me, the justification of the genre. But not all episodes of any panel show have moments like that. The good panel shows have them quite often, and the bad ones never get to them. But that’s the hope.
Now, I would say, to the more professional and success-driven approach of the American media, that is not good enough, whereas we in the Old World just give a bit less of a shit. I think American television, both good and bad, is made with almost insane focus and professionalism. And I’d say British TV, both good and bad, is made with a certain degree of fusty amateurism.
What brought you from the panel-show circuit to Ludwig?
I suppose my first exposure on television was in a sitcom, so doing something like Ludwig is more similar to the way I started. The panel-show thing is something I got into in the middle, really, and is a very different mode of life. It’s less hard work, but you do have to make sure you’ve had enough sleep so that your brain will hopefully spark when it needs to.
It’s great to be able to just go to a studio in an evening, play this parlor game in front of an audience, try and make them laugh, and then you’ve essentially done your contribution for a whole half hour of television in one evening. It doesn’t feel like work, and I love it. But if that was all I did in my job, I think it would feel like it’s not enough. It’s too slapdash, too easy. And I also like the more overt hard work of a long shoot where you are piecing together a program in lots of tiny bits, and you’re having to make each scene work and dealing with practical problems — like it starts raining halfway through, the light goes wrong, whatever. But you do that for weeks and weeks, and at the end of it, you’ve completed something intricate, and that’s satisfying in a completely different way.
As you are such a student of history, do you have any words of comfort for your American fans who are going through some … interesting historical times?
In short, I don’t, really. I think these are bewildering times — not just for America. There was an absolutely horrific survey — and I’m actually making this worse, I know these aren’t words of comfort at all — done by Channel 4 in the U.K. about Gen-Z people in Britain. I think they’d slightly put the pollsters up to getting this outcome, but still it was a shocking one: 52 percent of Gen Z people who were asked said that they think that it would be good to have a strong government that didn’t need to deal with elections and parliaments.
I thought, at least intellectually, the argument for democracy had been won. Because even in places like Russia where it’s not effectively a democracy, at least they pretend it’s a democracy. Putin doesn’t stand up and go, “No, we don’t need to bother with that.” He pretends to bother with it. I think most people believe in the principles of democracy, but they definitely, in a bewildered time, are seeking the easy blame-based answers of populist politicians. And I think the comfort we can take from that — but also it’s not a total comfort — is that these things do come in waves. They do get better as well as worse.
One of the messages we need to get across to people is to realize that while there are huge problems for the societies of the western countries, we have to remember how lucky we are in the conditions of our life — that, essentially, life is better in North America and Western Europe than it has been for the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived, ever, and by a huge margin. If we cannot find some contentedness in that — if we can’t stop ourselves blaming minorities for various problems we encounter — and we can’t see the bigger picture that we have an average life expectancy that’s longer than it’s ever been, better nutrition than has ever been, better support for the elderly than there’s ever been. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but the statistics bear this out: We just don’t know how lucky we are. So we are angrily railing against problems that are minute compared to those of our ancestors. But I don’t know how you get that message across to all these angry people. Telling them to get back in their boxes and be grateful, I don’t think that’s the way of winning an election.
Maybe everyone should read Unruly and learn about the Dark Ages and how lucky we are?
Well, from my personal point of view, that would be a very good development.
