Fashion
‘C.B. Strike’ Review: Cancellation With Extreme Prejudice
In a new season of the HBO and BBC series based on J.K. Rowling’s mystery novels, a misunderstood artist is the victim.
J.K. Rowling’s willingness to weigh in on transgender issues has made her a culture-wars combatant since before the turn of the decade. But it hasn’t appeared to affect her lucrative relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery, which is scheduled to start filming an HBO series based on her Harry Potter novels this summer.
And artistically, the results of that relationship have been rewarding. On average, Rowling’s work has fared as well onscreen as that of any best-selling writer, beginning with the Potter films and continuing with the highly entertaining Fantastic Beast movies. That winning streak has continued on television, where “C.B. Strike,” the BBC and HBO show based on the books she writes under the name Robert Galbraith, has been one of the better British mystery series of recent years.
Things get problematic, though, with the arrival on Thursday of “C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart,” based on the sixth of Rowling’s novels about the private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.
The four-episode season, on HBO, is still a well-made whodunit with two wonderful performances at its heart. But the human element that made earlier installments of “C.B. Strike” excellent is less in evidence here, overshadowed by a not-very-interesting topicality that seems likely to be an outgrowth of Rowling’s real-world experience.
“The Ink Black Heart” faced a challenge from the start: Its source is a thousand-page doorstop of a novel that is littered with replications of group chats, tweets and text exchanges. The book is an exhausting typographical obstacle course; that each of its 107 chapters begins with a snippet of poetry as an epigraph does not make reading it any easier.
Tom Edge, who has written the bulk of the TV series, and Sue Tully, the show’s longtime director, wisely make no attempt to put those reams of online chatter onscreen, settling for the occasional spoken reference. And they have condensed the story adroitly, eliminating whole plot lines to focus on the central investigation. They have not, however, been able to make the case much more interesting.
