Bodkin · Season 1 · Episode 1 · 9 May 2024
S1E1 Part One: American in Ireland
THE MOMENT Gilbert's first encounter with the Bodkin locals and his complete failure to understand the social codes of the small Irish community he's investigating - the fish-out-of-water dynamic that the episode establishes as the series' central comic register.
Bodkin's Netflix premiere drops an unlikely investigative trio - an American true crime podcaster, her reluctant Irish researcher, and a local journalist - into a small Irish coastal town to investigate a decades-old disappearance. The episode's comedy is dry and character-driven, Siobhán Cullen's Dove and Will Forte's Gilbert as an investigative pairing whose mutual irritation is the show's main comic...
Full episode analysis below. Spoiler-light verdict above.
Updated
Bodkin's premiere earns its 78% critical score through the intelligence of its pairing of Will Forte and Siobhán Cullen as investigative partners whose working styles are maximally incompatible. The Irish coastal town setting is deployed with enough specificity - the social insularity, the specific character of community memory around old crimes - that the comedy feels located rather than generic. Creator Jez Schaufeld's series finds a register between dark comedy and genuine mystery that the premiere sustains without committing to either fully. Cullen's Dove is the episode's formal achievement: a character whose competence and abrasiveness are established simultaneously, making her the most interesting element in a comedy that benefits from exactly this kind of anchor.