I’m not a twin, but I spent a lot of my childhood wishing I was. It always seemed so cool, the idea of sharing a face with someone, even pretending to be them just for fun. It might also explain why the premise of Ludwig, comedian David Mitchell’s new murder mystery series on BritBox, works so well.
Mitchell stars as John Taylor — no, not the Duran Duran bassist, but rather a quiet, reserved man who makes his living as a puzzle setter, or the person who comes up with crosswords and logic problems for magazines and newspapers. He’s happy with his life, where he hardly leaves his house and spends most of his time thinking through new puzzles, but of course, that’s no good setup for a series, is it?
So, instead of being able to comfortably sit back and submit his cryptic crosswords, John is summoned to Cambridge by his sister-in-law (Anna Maxwell Martin), who reveals that her husband — John’s twin brother, James — has gone missing. She wants him to find out what happened, and their best idea of a plan is to… have John impersonate his brother, who just so happens to be the Detective Inspector of Cambridge’s police department. As you can imagine, things go awry fairly quickly.
David Mitchell Isn’t Just Rehashing ‘Peep Show’ for Mystery Lovers

For those who may be used to associating Mitchell with the awkwardness and existentialism of Peep Show, his performance in Ludwig is an unexpected but entirely welcome turn, particularly because he manages to escape the “neurodivergent as savant” trope. John, whether pretending as James or being himself, is not some kind of one-dimensional cardboard cutout who only sees the world in one specific way, and cannot function if that view changes. He gets in his own way occasionally, yes, but he’s charming and caring, with a gold heart buried under his brother’s clothes and the contacts he’s forced to wear, and Mitchell’s history in standup and on panel shows helps emphasize a comedic side to John that keeps things from getting stale too quickly.
The same goes for the supporting cast, a mix of fresher faces and seasoned professionals who liven up the standard ensemble cast roles with their tenacity. Anna Maxwell Martin gets some of my favorite comedic moments in the season, so understatedly acerbic that they’re almost easy to miss, and it’s lovely to see Ralph Ineson out of the confines of the grim, grimy Robert Eggers films he’s been frequenting lately.
Sophie Willan is sadly underused as IT wizard Holly — I recommend Alma’s Not Normal if you want more of her — but it’s a delight to see someone who tried to hop across a river in Season 17 of Taskmaster as the straight man, especially in a series where everyone’s operating just at the edge of normal human behavior. And the guest stars are just as delightful; I was pleasantly surprised to see Derek Jacobi make an appearance as a kooky old maths professor after so many years listening to him as the War Master in Big Finish’s Doctor Who stories.

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‘Ludwig’ Stands Apart in an Overcrowded Genre

Image via BritBox

It’s really Ludwig’s overall format that does it for me, setting it apart from even some of the best procedurals out there. Framing each murder as a puzzle scratches a particular itch for me, as someone who’s seen just about every murder mystery series out there. While it doesn’t exactly revolutionize the formula we’ve seen so many times before, it does allow the series to show us how the sausage gets made, so to speak — by allowing John to break each crime down, Poirot-style, into its most fundamental bits and pieces, so you see exactly how it all came together without having cut a single corner.
If I had to compare this show to anything, I’d say the closest match probably is David Suchet’s Poirot, if Agatha Christie’s detective couldn’t park a car and kept getting sidetracked from the huge mystery he’s supposed to be solving. It’s the perfect example of a “cozy mystery” series, even as its overarching plot becomes much heavier than what those kinds of series tend to address. The logic has some holes, and surely the entire base premise would’ve been seen through in a second in any other detective show, but we never throw these kinds of shows on to challenge our brains, right? They exist for comfort, to soothe the mind when everything gets to be a bit too much.
There’s a lot of potential for Ludwig’s future, especially given the clean, open-ended way it wraps up this season, with a second already confirmed and on the way. It’s not a terribly cerebral show, that I can’t deny. It probably won’t make any best-of-the-year lists, especially given that most of the praise I’ve heaped on it was already given by international critics when the show initially premiered. But there’s something to be said for the underdogs, the ones we put on after the Severances and the Yellowjackets when we need something fresh that hasn’t been analyzed to death — and if nothing else, Ludwig has freshness.
Ludwig premieres March 20 on BritBox.

Ludwig

David Mitchell’s Ludwig is a breath of fresh air for the murder mystery genre, with an excellent supporting cast.

Release Date

September 25, 2024

Cast

Pros & Cons

David Mitchell brings nuance and depth to the standard detective protagonist.
The supporting cast does an excellent job of keeping things fresh and interesting in a familiar set-up.
The show’s puzzle formula revamps the standard murdery mystery set-up, giving it a fresh face.