Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

Okay, so pay close attention cause this one’s a little hard to put into words. The first and most important thing to know about this show is that it makes absolutely no sense…. at first.

Right so, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. We’ve got a mouthful of a title that only partially makes sense to the untrained eye, so let’s break it down intellectually.

Firstly we have Dirk Gentley, which happens to be the name of the protagonist. Holistic is the philosophical belief that everything is interconnected to form a much bigger picture, no matter how small. And finally… well we all know what a Detective Agency is…. Though it’s funny because they’re not detectives and there’s no agency… but that’s not important for now, so we’ll just let that one fly.

As detectives (I know what I just said!) Dirk (Samuel Barnett) and Todd (Elijah Wood) are piecing together the strange events that are happening around them in order to solve incredibly vague cases assigned to them by even more unclear individuals.

A little background info: The series is based on a book written by The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams – which if you’ve read (or seen the movie) puts a lot of the shows strangeness into perspective.

If you’re coming into this show completely blind the best way I can describe it is as a Young Doctor Who on Ket in the real world.

I don’t know why Elijah Wood keeps going out for these strange roles (*Cough* Wilfred *Cough*), but it suits him nonetheless. Dirk and Todd are a really interesting pair; Dirk is all enthusiasm and optimism where Todd is cynical, lazy and basically a coward.

The whole holistic aspect is what really makes the show. The fact that everything is somehow seemingly accidentally connected makes events a lot more fun to experience.  Due to the non-chronological timeline, we the audience often piece things together first and eagerly wait for the characters to catch up – which they often do, whilst managing to pull out a couple more surprises in the reveal.

Alongside Dirk and Todd’s misadventures the other characters and their stories happening alongside their own are just as interesting and makes for an organised mess of events. This really expands in the second series which worked well as by that point we had gotten use to how random the show was.

By how long this review ended up being, you can tell I really enjoyed this show. It was easy to watch and completely different from everything else I was watching, and sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

Sadly, after eagerly looking for rumored dates for a third series, I found that Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency has been axed.

What a damn shame – there was still so much left to be uncovered and over the two seasons the characters had developed and grown Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency will go on the hall of fame of shows that fell too soon… but you never know, in this day and age you can never say never.