Wild Bill review: Rob Lowe’s new Lincolnshire-set cop drama is so dreary it makes Happy Valley feel like Miami Vice
The American actor takes his role in the brand new ITV series far too seriously
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Your support makes all the difference.Why isn’t Wild Bill (ITV1) sillier? America’s Rob Lowe plays a fish-out-of-water super-cop banished to Lincolnshire to sort out the hopeless local police. The murder rate is off the charts, the overtime budget out of control. A bike thief prowls the byways with impunity.
Lincolnshire, we are reminded, is also crazy keen on Brexit (it voted Leave by the heaviest national margin). This is presumably why its largest town of Boston – no, not the one in New England, it explains five minutes in – is portrayed as essentially teetering on the brink of the known world. Parachuting in Rob Lowe should be dafter than casting George Clooney as a bin man on Coronation Street.
The problem may be that Lowe is taking it all so very seriously. With his last two American network shows unceremoniously canned, he has apparently embraced a Wednesday night ITV copper caper as a second chance. He isn’t even the teeniest bit in on the joke. There are no jokes, actually (despite the series official billing as “comedy drama”). What it instead boils down to is the West Wing and Parks and Recreation star pulling the straightest of faces as detective “Wild” Bill Hixon.
He drives around Lincolnshire solving crimes, while also making time to not get on with his 14-year-old daughter (Aloreia Spencer). The only occasion he shoots from the hip, Dirty Harry-style, is when telling one of his new subordinates that the departmental overtime spend really needs to be reeled in.
That’s a honking shame, because the potential for Wild Bill to plunge into accidental hilarity is obviously massive. At the risk of a spoiler, the killer at the end of the first episode is revealed to be… a vicious wind turbine. And we meet a head in a freezer – this is semi-played for chuckles, which is disturbing – and watch footage of Bill punching a teenager back in Florida.
On paper, it sounds so fantastically clunking. The reality is alas merely grim and a bit cheapo Broadchurch. Bill strikes up a weird chemistry with his partner detective Muriel Yeardsley (Bronwyn James) – one of their early exchanges is him commenting on her weight. Lincolnshire is, meanwhile, shot in a way that suggests it’s had a huge bucket of water emptied over it.
Wild Bill doesn’t even put much effort into explaining how its hero ended up in Britain, beyond the cursory explanation that he’s been drafted in to balance the books as new chief constable. Bizarrely, this is the one component of the series culled from real life – David Cameron’s failed attempt to place a New York City police commissioner, William Bratton, in charge of the London Met.
Lowe’s tan and self-assurance feel like tears in the fabric of reality as he tootles around, it’s true. Yet he never quite goes full Hollywood, which probably speaks to his skills as an actor but is also a howling letdown. He glowers a lot instead – a trick he appears to have picked up from Lincolnshire’s low skies and angry drizzle.
Far more bonkers than his performance is the actual storyline, which centres on that head in the freezer. This leads to the victim’s dodgy drug-dealing boyfriend from back in the day. He’s Polish, so has had to change his name. Just off-screen, Lincolnshire is apparently swarming with pitchfork-wielding Brexiteers.
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Bill breezes through it all. Lowe can’t even be bothered uncorking one of his trademark cocky grins until a face-off with local posho – and presumably potential love interest – Lady Mary (Rachael Stirling).
Where it all leads to is a standoff, atop the aforementioned turbine, between the dead woman’s romance-hungry mum (Suzanne Lynch) and Bill. How did they get up there? Why isn’t a shouting match atop a turbine as much fun as it should be? And whose idea was it to bring Rob Lowe to Lincolnshire, only to bung him into a police procedural so dreary it makes Happy Valley feel like Miami Vice?
Wild Bill airs Wednesdays at 9pm on ITV1
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