I’ll watch Derek Jacobi in virtually anything but this series wore thin on me after about half a dozen viewings. Set in the middle ages, Jacobi plays a monk with a gift for herb cures and solving murders.

The show has some interesting looks at the period and the day-to-day lives of monks, and the supporting cast is usually quite good. But the first few shows were laughable in how much the sets and costumes looked like Disneyland. The setting is in Wales, yet everything and everyone looked so clean and shiny!

By the time I stopped watching it, the roads were appropriately muddy and people had dirt-encrusted fingernails. And at least the autopsies looked like they were taking tips from the production of The Name of the Rose. But this isn’t quite as good as The Name of the Rose (based on the book by Umberto Eco, about a monk who must solve a string of murders).

The murders in this show are all basically the same since motivations in the middle ages were not as varied as they are now. And the murders weren’t usually done in any terribly imaginative way. It overall was more Robin Hood than Umberto Eco, so I didn’t stay with it. But maybe it got better.