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Harry Wild: Series 1
R0 - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (30th May 2023). |
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The Film
 After years of trying to teach arrogant shits the whys of human existence through literature, college professor Harry Wild (Somewhere in Time's Jane Seymour) retires in hopes of writing a great novel; that is, after getting off her face and snogging the new archaeology professor. Faced with a blank page, she goes shopping and winds up on the wrong end of a mugging. An unwelcome guest in the household of her Dublin police detective son Charlie (Copper's Kevin Ryan), Harry comes across her son's case files for the brutal murder of a former child molester and recognizes the murder scene as being inspired by a scene from the obscure Elizabethan play "Calabras" in the series opener "When Harry Met Fergus" (49:23). When her son proves anything but receptive to her input, she takes it upon herself to do some investigating of her own with the reluctant help of her juvenile assailant Fergus (Whitstable Pearl's Rohan Nedd), finding further evidence of a killer using the play as twisted inspiration in the high-profile disappearance of a local aspiring actress; but she is soon in over her head as she discovers that deducing a crime and apprehending the killer are very different things. Having determined to "make a man of" troubled student Fergus by inspiring him with the same literary works that put him to sleep at school, Harry finds herself running afoul of her son and his superiors when the notoriety brought by her first case attracts more inquiries about crimes that have been overlooked by the police. In "Samurai Plague Doctor Kills for Kicks" (47:18), a widow suspects that her husband's supposed suicide was a murder, and Fergus discovers a link between a series of unconnected "suicides" that puts Harry in the target of a live-streaming snuff ring. In "Mincemeat" (43:45), Harry tries to convince her son of a conspiracy surrounding the positive identification of the body of a man pulled from the river on the basis of a pair of cheap shoes. The action ratchets up in "An Unhappy Happy is a Dangerous Thing" (48:59) in which Fergus presses Harry to investigate the murder of a too-timid loan shark with the agreement that the dead man's boss Happy (The Commitments's Liam Carney) will wipe his father's debts – and stop threatening to break his eight-year-old sister's arm if his dad does not pay up – only to discover that the culprit is a serial killer (Wreck's Peter Claffey) obsessed with "Crime and Punishment" (Dostoevsky, that is) who thinks Harry is an ideal reluctant accomplice. In "A Corpse in My Soup" (49:00), Harry becomes a suspect when she crashes a faculty dinner only to discover that the target of her barbs is floating in the water tank. A fun "bottle episode" is "Best Laid Schemes" (42:28) in which Harry, Fergus, Harry's granddaughter Lola (Rose O'Neill), and Glenn rescue a beaten man from the trunk of a car during a raging storm and suspect that one of the other customers trapped at June's pub is the kidnapper. Beginning darkly but finding lighter footing is "The Mystery of Granny Susan's Fun Time Wig" (48:32) in which the matriarch of a wealthy family is strangled during her birthday; but how can any of her family be suspects when they all witnessed the murder online from the far reaches of Edinburgh, London, and Paris? Finally, in "No One Here Gets Out Alive" (51:26), Harry discovers her burgeoning romance with Ray has more repercussions than annoyance about his mid-life crisis dreams of forming a rock band when her son is suspended and Ray's narrow-minded replacement Whitney (Being Erica's Adam Fergus) persecutes a former drug addict (Domina's Isabelle Connolly) who believes she is being gaslighted by an ex (who soon turns up dead). While Acorn Media has a nice library of classic British detective TV mysteries, they have been rather erratic in attempting to replicate the "cozy" formula in their own originals and adaptations. Harry Wild, therefore, stands out as a refreshing take on a somewhat similar formula of an amateur detective surprisingly (improbably) finding a lot of cases suited to the specificity of their interests a la Acorn's The Madame Blanc Mysteries and ITV's Rosemary & Thyme. After years of being more memorable for skin care infomercials and a jewelry line than roles, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman's Seymour is less successful at looking haggard but far more entertainingly ballsy. The cases are generally diverting and the suspects less obvious for the most part, and Seymour's protagonist is placed in actual danger in most of the episodes and usually talks herself in deeper – although Fergus and Charlie take the brunt of the physical abuse – and in most cases manages to use her wits more often than brawn to get herself out of it. Other series regulars include Harry's resourceful electrician friend Glenn (Informer's Paul Tylak), Fergus' alcoholic, gambling father Malky (Michael Inside's Shane Lynch) and eight-year-old sister Liberty (Rosa Willow Lee), Charlie's wife Orla (The Stag's Amy Huberman), Charlie's chief Ray Tiernan (Hunger's Stuart Graham) and his wife and immediate superior Vivian (Fair City's Ciara O'Callaghan), and pub owner June (The Other Lamb's Esosa Ighodaro). 
Video
Handsomely-lensed in HD in generally overcast Irish exteriors and warmly-lit interiors, Harry Wild's 2.00:1 anamorphic PAL encode is better-served than some Acorn releases by splitting its eight episodes evenly over two dual-layer discs with a sufficient bitrate. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track that gets the job done with a dialogue-heavy show in which directional effects are used sparingly and overall ambiance and music spread out well enough. Optional English HoH subtitles are included. 
Extras
Both discs open with the same Acorn start-up promo (1:20) while disc two includes the latter four episodes and the disc's special features, the overall behind the scenes EPK piece "Wild About Harry" (34:34), the character chemistry-oriented "Meet Harry and Fergus" (4:29), and a picture gallery (1:48). The former two also have English HoH subtitles enabled through the setup menu for the episodes. 
Overall
Amidst more hits than misses in replicating the British "cozy" mystery formula, Harry Wild stands out as entertaining and diverting with a nice turn from Jane Seymour.
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