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Wall Street Journal

‘Art Detectives' Review: Flirtation and Forgery on Acorn TV

There's nothing genuinely counterfeit about 'Art Detectives,' although the series is far less about art than about detectives, of the type that usually populate Sunday-night Brit mysteries on PBS. Is it a case of bait-and-switch? Or just the palette at hand? 'Any Day Now,' a rentable new feature about the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (during which a Vermeer, three Rembrandts and a Manet were heisted) is also far more about the characters on screen than the ones on canvas. The still life does not comfortably conform to the motion picture. Thus 'Art Detectives' ranges far and wide. Investigator Mick Palmer (Stephen Moyer, 'True Blood') is the U.K.'s virtual one-man Heritage Crime Unit, whose assignments can range from Belfast to Cornwall to London and involve vintage wines, Titanic memorabilia or a crime that happened to be committed in a National Trust house. His jurisdiction is fluid, his knowledge extensive; his cases involve forgery, fraud, trafficking and murder. During the investigation into an art historian's fatal bludgeoning in episode 1, he is assisted by a local constable, Shazia Malik (Nina Singh), who takes stock of her tiny force, small-minded supervisor and the rolling landscape of art investigation and promptly doubles the size of Mick's department.