As a genre, the cozy murder mystery avoids graphic violence in favor of something less grisly despite the crime at hand: The careful piecing together of a puzzle. A subgenre particular to England somehow involves the clergy in all this sleuthing. “Grantchester” (on PBS Masterpiece) pairs a vicar and a police detective, and like the similarly-themed UK imports “Father Brown” and “Sister Boniface,” these shows are all set in the mid-20th century. Why? Beats me. Now in its ninth season, “Grantchester” boasts a new vicar. This is very good news.
The show had become steadily tedious in recent years. But with Rishi Nair as Alfie, the new man in the collar beginning with Episode 3, suddenly there is wit and life in this series (renewed for another season earlier this week). Alfie is self-possessed and watchful, but also dashing; Nair holds the screen with real charisma. Within 10 minutes of his first appearance, he’s taking his shirt off and I confessed laughed. The church may be one of the main settings, but the role has consistently been cast with an eye towards sex appeal.
Nair brings a certain style and panache that was otherwise missing with Tom Brittney as the previous vicar, named Will, who had become a self-pitying bore (ditto for the vicar he replaced, played by James Norton). So here we are on vicar No. 3 and the show is self-aware enough to poke fun at the idea that every vicar would want to solve crimes with the warmly gruff police detective Geordie Keating (Robson Green).
Once Will moves on, Geordie is lost and mopey. So he tentatively approaches Alfie in the pub: “I have in the past come to your predecessors to ask for help.” Alfie takes a sip from his beer unmoved. Geordie pressed on: “I need your help with a case … will you help me or not?” No, comes the answer. But eventually curiosity gets the best of Alfie and he succumbs.
But let’s rewind. Before Alfie has a chance to introduce himself to anyone, Mrs. C, the busybody vicarage housekeeper (played with tang by Tessa Peake-Jones) breathlessly announces that there’s a gentleman breaking into the vicarage. “A swarthy gentleman.” Later, she comments that it’s “very modern, I suppose, to have a vicar from — ”
“Whatever you’re going to say, don’t say it,” someone stops her.
“I was only going to say from the empire,” she insists. Alfie pipes in: “I’m from Bromford, actually.” But Mrs. C keeps barreling on: Another village, she says, has a vicar from Devon. “They think they’ve got something to boast about.”
The show doesn’t pretend Grantchester is a color-blind utopia. The people are insensitive at best, stubbornly bigoted at worst, and there’s a decent balance between that reality and maintaining the show’s gauzy-pleasant we’re-all-friends-here approach.
That goes for the ongoing storyline of Leonard, as well. A former curate who left the church because he is gay, Leonard (played with real depth by Al Weaver) has always been the show’s beating heart and its conscience. He’s the first to make an effort to welcome Alfie. “You’ll find they” — the village — “take a while to soften towards anything different,” Leonard tells him. Did they soften towards you, Alfie asks? “God, no!”
Leonard still feels like an outcast, but he has been warmly embraced by a detective and each successive vicar. How ironic that the two most conservative institutions in the village — the police and the church — are also the most humanistic and open-minded!
It’s a nice fantasy, anyway.
“Grantchester” Season 9 — 3 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: 8 p.m. Sundays on PBS Masterpiece
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
