Watchable the week of Sept. 7, 2020

SHOW OF THE WEEK: Van der Valk (Sept. 13, PBS)

It’s not like the smart but surly male detective who doesn’t suffer fools is anything new. They’ve been popping up in pop culture at least as far back as Sherlock Holmes, but there’s a reason they persist: people enjoy reading about them and watching them. 

Piet Van der Valk is the creation of British author Nicolas Freeling, who published the first novel in the series in 1962. This isn’t the first TV adaptation, either: Barry Foster played the Dutch detective on British TV in the 1970s and again in the early ’90s.

This version, a British-German co-production, gives the lead to Marc Warren, an English actor whose face you’re sure to recognize for appearances in everything from “Oliver Twist” to “Band of Brothers” to “The Good Wife.” He’s backed by more Brits, including Maimie McCoy (“DCI Banks,” “A Confession”), Elliot Barnes-Worrell (“Jericho”), Luke Allen-Gale and Emma Fielding.

The action has been updated to present-day Amsterdam. In fact, the opening scene is a pulse-pounding bike chase along one of the main canals. So, like “The Sounds,” which I wrote about last week, “Van der Valk” gives you the chance to do some armchair travelling.

It doesn’t reinvent the wheel of detective drama, but it does give it a fresh spin, with plots involving far-right populist politics, drug harm-reduction clinics, art galleries, eco-fashion, even religious erotica.

A second season is already planned, pandemic permitting.

The Duchess (Sept. 11, Netflix)

My natural inclination is to support this comedy, given that it was written by and stars a Canadian, Katherine Ryan, an expat who’s made quite a name for herself in Britain.

But I nearly turned it off in the first few minutes after Ryan’s character, also named Katherine, launched a tasteless, over-the-top verbal attack on another mother whose daughter is making life difficult for Katherine’s daughter Olive (Katy Byrne) at school.

I have nothing against transgressive females. I adored “Fleabag” just like everyone else, but “The Duchess” lacks that series’ cleverness and winking self-awareness. And though Katherine’s outlandish outfits put me in mind of Patsy and Edina from “Absolutely Fabulous,” the jokes here are nowhere near as sharp.

Still, I stuck with it and warmed a little to Katherine and her relationship with Olive. The plot involves the single mother’s attempts to conceive a sibling for her beloved daughter. She has an adoring dentist boyfriend (Steen Raskopoulos), to whom she’s unwilling to commit, and an ex, a washed-up boy band singer (Rory Keenan), whom she actively hates.

There’s certainly a concept to be mined here in the idea of a single, relationship-shy mom eager to expand her family, but it would work better if the jokes were made to serve the material more cohesively.

Coastal Elites (Sept. 12, 8 p.m., HBO)

Whether you enjoy this TV movie, a series of monologues between 13 and 24 minutes long, probably depends a lot on whether you’re one of the elites referenced in the title — or at least sympathetic to a certain liberal, urban world view.

Filmed under quarantine and written by playwright Paul Rudnick, the film boasts a formidable cast: Bette Midler, Dan Levy of “Schitt’s Creek,” Issa Rae (“Insecure”), Sarah Paulson (“American Horror Story”) and Kaitlyn Dever (“Unbelievable”). Each actor speaks to an unseen person on the other side of the camera and the performances reflect on two current crises: the presidency of Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Midler delivers the most pointed Trump critique as a New York Times-loving, Public Theater-subscribing, Norwegian detective-watching, Jewish liberal New Yorker who’s arrested after a confrontation with a man in a Starbucks wearing a MAGA hat.

Levy, as an out, gay actor confiding in a therapist, touches on the anti-gay agenda of Vice-President Mike Pence in a monologue that skewers Hollywood hypocrisy toward gay performers; Rae, playing a rich Black businesswoman, recounts an unsettlingly close encounter with Ivanka Trump, a.k.a. “The Blonde Cloud”; Paulson, as an internet meditation coach, describes her failed attempt to quarantine with her family of Trump supporters in Wisconsin.

Dever, whose monologue as a nurse in a New York hospital in the early days of COVID is the most naturalistic and the most heartrending, never mentions Trump directly as she shares her grief over the death of a patient she became particularly close to. Rather, his connection to the devastation that the pandemic wrought in that city is implied.

Odds and Ends

Peacock’s “Brave New World,” an adaptation of the dystopian Aldous Huxley novel, makes its Canadian debut Sept. 13 at 9 p.m. on Showcase. It stars Jessica Brown Findlay (“Downton Abbey”) as Lenina, a woman from New London, where every aspect of life is tightly controlled, and Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”) as John, who comes from the so-called Savage Lands.

Showcase also has a couple of British comedies on tap: “Intelligence” (Sept. 13, 9 p.m.), which stars David Schwimmer of “Friends” as an American National Security agent assigned to a U.K. cybercrime bureau; and “Hitmen” (Sept. 13, 10:30 p.m.), in which English comedy team Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc play misfit killers for hire.

PBS has the documentary “Human Nature” (Sept. 9, 8 p.m.) on “Nova,” about the perils and promise of CRISPR DNA editing technology.

And if you’re a fan of designing twins Jonathan and Drew Scott, a.k.a. the Property Brothers, there’s a new season of “Brother vs. Brother” on HGTV, Sept. 13 at 9 p.m.