In the Mitchell and Webb double act, David Mitchell is Paul McCartney and Robert Webb is John Lennon. Mitchell has the prime slot on Britain’s best panel show, has published several collections of his wry Observer columns and has played William Shakespeare on BBC One. Robert Webb has a scary heart disorder that for some time stopped him from acting, has spoken publicly about a drink problem in his past, and has published a fine confessional memoir about toxic masculinity. Mitchell is broad, institutional and straightforward; Webb is tortured and particular. The former is so used to laughter tracks he must expect them in his kitchen and, even when acting, speaks in an exclamatory, crowd-pleasing accent; the other makes thoughtful, misty-eyed appearances on podcasts.
Like Lennon and McCartney, your preference between each man probably says more about you than their objective talents. And like Lennon and McCartney, they’re so much better together than apart. Without the steadying handhold of their balancing act, they are left to pursue paths that quickly wear into grooves, and then into confining furrows.
And if McCartney had an indulgence for the broad vaudeville Lennon called “granny-music shit”, Mitchell has an indulgence for what we should probably call “granny-TV shit”. Hence the BBC’s Ludwig, the steady, easy, comedy-drama that gives cosy crime a new level of armchair somnolence – dozy crime – and which has become one of the most popular fictions on telly. The first series saw David Mitchell play a reclusive, awkward newspaper puzzle-setter called John Taylor (byline: “Ludwig”) whose twin brother, James, is a detective in Cambridgeshire. But when James goes missing, John is enlisted by his sister-in-law Lucy (played by the ubiquitous Anna Maxwell Martin) to pose as her husband, infiltrate the police and find out what happened. And in his posing, John proves remarkably good at solving homicides, the logic of East Anglia’s most murderous goons apparently mirroring the logic of assembling cryptics and KenKens.
It made for a twee variation on the amateur detective theme, but by the end of the series its premises were half-exhausted: John had been forced to come clean about his Martin Guerre operation, and James had made contact (though is still missing), guiding John to a stash of documents. They were previously held by a murdered conspiracy theorist, one of his numerous files apparently holding the key to the mystery.
This second series unimaginatively picks the thread straight back up. John is still assisting the Cambridge police – a force which, unbelievably, works by pinning documents and photographs to panes of glass before staring at them – while making marginal progress towards finding his brother. He solves his requisite murder each episode – the first a sort of dark King Solomon situation in which two sisters both claim to have murdered their mother, and the second a stabbing at a wedding dance. But otherwise the larger story inches along, in the general direction of the local MP, who is played by Fleabag’s sister, and who appears to be at the heart of some sort of Hot Fuzz-esque network of rural power brokers, disappearing difficult locals.
There’s a tremendous dramatic contrast between the missing-brother arc and the tone of each episode, rather as if, in gravitational terms, half the series is filmed on Earth and the other on the moon. John went to the Shaggy-and-Scooby school of law enforcement, and unmasks his killers with a genial presentation at the end of the episode, and there’s always space for a quip or even a group hug after the murder is solved. (“OK, we, um, pausing our arrest for a toast then?” says one of John’s deputies, quite rightly, as the wedding murderer and his family propose some sort of drink to themselves.) It makes it rather difficult to settle back down to the talk of dead fiancées. Nor is there, as with other crime series, any room for contemporary satire – with his Nokia, his pointless tie and his apparent sexlessness, John Taylor is played as a man out of time.
But this is to attack a genre rather than to attack Ludwig. The British viewing public, and the reading public too, have a remarkable appetite for murder and giggles. Ludwig is a mystery that, like a crossword, can arrest, puzzle and intrigue, before being solved and forgotten.
Ludwig
BBC One
[Further reading: Count Binface’s final stand]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentHmmm, bit like shooting fish in a barrel, this review. “Bank holiday’s coming up – will this do?” Still, now we can all remember where we were when the David Mitchell backlash started. (That’ll make more sense to old NME readers of a certain vintage…)
Well, you can only have so much of a good thing, right? Unless, of course, it’s a crime series.