Ludwig Review

Ludwig is now streaming on Britbox.

Actors playing doubles (and even multiples) of themselves onscreen is back in a big way. Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17. Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners. Practically everyone on Severance. Add to this esteemed company English comedian David Mitchell, who appears as identical twins in the delightful mystery comedy Ludwig. Fans of British police procedurals and comedy panel shows rejoice: The Peep Show star and Big Fat Quiz fixture playing a missing detective and the misanthropic puzzle designer impersonating his brother to find out where he went is exactly as fun as it sounds.

Most of Ludwig rides on the curmudgeonly charisma of Mitchell’s public persona. (It’s not for nothing that he played the stodgy PC in the UK version of Apple’s “Get a Mac” commercials.) Main character John Taylor (“Ludwig” is the name he self-publishes puzzle books under) is a harrumphing eccentric, bewildered by small talk and apt to go on long tirades berating people for improper joke structure. He putters around crime scenes in a tweed jacket with a pocket full of pens, notebook at the ready. Fortunately, his love of puzzles makes him an unusually astute solver of murders – helpful when you’re trying to convince other people you’re actually detective chief inspector James Taylor of the Cambridge police.

Ludwig’s puzzles themselves are a delight, though you don’t have to understand them in order to enjoy the show. (Source: yours truly, who is terrible at puzzles.) The episodes are structured as if by a Cryptoquip enthusiast Agatha Christie: an impossible crime, a group of suspects, a few red herrings (“false paths” in puzzler lingo), and a monologue at the end where the perpetrator is unmasked. Each one involves some sort of common puzzle type – a code, a logic grid, a hidden acrostic – that eventually leads John towards the correct conclusion. His fellow officers are baffled by his unorthodox methods, but the results speak for themselves.

Ludwig isn’t too concerned with breaking any new ground in the comedy procedural genre, sticking to a conventional case-of-the-week structure and keeping things light. (As light as a show involving homicide investigations and a man, his sister-in-law, and his nephew searching for a missing family member can be.) It’s in the details where the show finds its charms: John, a nerdy loner all his life, finds enjoyment in playacting the role of husband and father to James’ wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), and son, Henry (Dylan Hughes). In turn, Lucy and Henry immediately and enthusiastically take to the scavenger hunt for clues to James’ whereabouts, implying he’s a more absent figure in their lives than they’d let on.

The well-rounded main cast makes for an unlikely family unit but a great trio of leads, growing closer as the show progresses towards its dramatic finale. It’s just one of the ways Ludwig looks askance at the vast sea of British crime shows, finding new routes into familiar formulas as only a master puzzle-solver could. The guy who calls himself Ludwig may have an exact genetic match out there, but Ludwig the show is a comedy without equal.