As a genre, the cozy murder mystery avoids graphic violence in favor of something less grisly despite the crime at hand: The careful piecing together of a puzzle. A subgenre particular to England somehow involves the clergy in all this sleuthing. “Grantchester” pairs a vicar and a police detective, and like the similarly-themed UK imports “Father Brown” and “Sister Boniface,” these shows are all set in the mid-20th century. Why? Beats me.
Nair brings a certain style and panache that was otherwise missing with Tom Brittney as the previous vicar, named Will, who had become a self-pitying bore . So here we are on vicar No. 3 and the show is self-aware enough to poke fun at the idea thatvicar would want to solve crimes with the warmly gruff police detective Geordie Keating .Once Will moves on, Geordie is lost and mopey. So he tentatively approaches Alfie in the pub: “I have in the past come to your predecessors to ask for help.
“I was only going to say from the empire,” she insists. Alfie pipes in: “I’m from Bromford, actually.” But Mrs. C keeps barreling on: Another village, she says, has a vicar from Devon. “They thinkThe show doesn’t pretend Grantchester is a color-blind utopia. The people are insensitive at best, stubbornly bigoted at worst, and there’s a decent balance between that reality and maintaining the show’s gauzy-pleasant we’re-all-friends-here approach.