A few years ago the BBC made a brilliant TV series based on Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels. Typically, it lasted a grand total of four episodes before it was canned. Undeterred, however, BBC America have picked up the baton for a new eight-episode run scripted by Max Landis. Playing the part of the holistic detective this time will be Samuel Barnett, replacing the previous version's Stephen Mangan.
Elijah Wood will co-star as Gently's long-suffering sidekick Todd, re-named for some reason from the books and previous series' Richard MacDuff.
If the name's unfamiliar, Dirk Gently was Adams' other creation alongside his more famour The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Gently - real name Svlad Djelli - is an investigator who approaches his cases based on a belief in the interconnectedness of all things. He blundered through two adventures, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency in 1987, and The Long, Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul a year later. The latter features the Norse gods, and the former involves Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an alien, and an electric monk that believes the world is pink. A third yarn, The Salmon Of Doubt, remained unfinished at the time of Adams' death in 2001.
Quite what Landis has planned, plot-wise, remains to be seen, but the official line is that we're looking at a single mystery per season (should this Dirk Gently last more than one), rather than standalone episodes.
The new series is a co-production between the aforementioned BBC America, AMC Studios, Ideate Media and comics publisher IDW. Stargate SG1's Robert Cooper will act as showrunner, with Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot helming the first two episodes. Production will get underway shortly, and Dirk Gently should arrive in the autumn of this year.