In the modest new British detective series Ludwig, comedian David Mitchell—who you will likely know as uptight office drone Mark Corrigan from Jesse Armstrong’s very pre-Succession cult hit Peep Show—plays the shut-in twin of what appears to have been a much livelier detective who goes missing. John Taylor, whose literal job it is to make puzzles (for which he uses the titular pen name), gets a call from his sister-in-law (a delightful Anna Maxwell Martin), whom he has known since they were kids, who therefore also knows she has to send a cab hundreds of miles to pick him up and bring him to the university town of Cambridge where she lives, because otherwise he will not leave the house (she vows to match the exact meal she knows he’s having to make it up to him).
She enlists John to pose as his brother, James, in order to infiltrate his detective agency and solve the mystery of how he went missing, but in the meantime, John keeps getting waylaid. Turns out his puzzle skills make him incredibly adept at solving crimes—of which there are a surprising number in such a small town—through swift deductive reasoning (and a lot of confusing number crunching), if not at entirely convincing his coworkers this new socially inept personality in fact belongs to the twin he is claiming to be. At one point in the second episode, James’s son has to be reassured by his mother that John is up to the job. “Your uncle is the most brilliant person I’ve ever known, there’s nothing he can’t do,” she says. A beat. “Actually that’s a lie, there’s a lot of things he can’t do, but he CAN do this.”
It’s the perfect summation of Mitchell himself, who, on screen, never seems to stray much outside of a narrow persona that was consolidated two decades ago on Peep Show, which as far as I can tell from the interviews I have read and heard (not to mention the countless panel shows he’s on), is basically just him. How do you sum up that persona? I mean, British? It’s basically a kind of tight, dry flatness, with a hyper-practical law-abiding approach to life while being constantly on edge over its small peccadilloes. Journalist Steve Dineen described the Mitchell brand as “a kind of figurehead for sensible centrism, a dogged defender of procedure and protocol, a conservative with the smallest possible 'c'.”
Ludwig is Mitchell’s first main dramatic role, which is a stretch because this is as light as crime series come, falling easily into the cozy mystery category, a kind of Mr. Marple where you expect every episode to end with the announcement that it was Mr. Plum in the dining room. It’s Clue in the gorgeous setting of Cambridge to the gorgeous deconstructed sounds of another Ludwig (Beethoven). The show premiered in September of last year on the BBC, and was renewed for a second series less than a month later. The show can thank its satisfying familiarity for that. John Taylor is basically Mark Corrigan. He is duty bound and perpetually uncomfortable, the kind of guy who only reads history books and just missed getting into Cambridge (though his brother is a grad). His IQ is just above genius, which “never helps when it comes to chatting.” John uses expressions like “mid-meal bathroom break” as though they are common parlance, and high-minded references no one understands (“He’s charging 30 pounds an hour to misquote Aesop.”) In one scene straight out of Peep Show, he watches as the wife of the man he’s interrogating attempts to remove a stain from his sweater. “That’s gonna need dry cleaning,” John says, nodding, then, trying to guess the source with the kind of insight you know comes from decades of assiduous cleanliness, “Egg?”
It’s not like I’m the first to notice how little Mitchell flexes on screen. Or to comment on it. Critic Joel Golby’s glowing Guardian review of Ludwig opens with: “David Mitchell … well, look. Nobody is ever going to accuse him of being ‘an actor with range,’ are they?” And on Reddit, one user wrote, “David Mitchell is actually not a very versatile actor or do they always write the same type of role for him?” and noted: “I don’t know if it’s done intentionally, but I just now started watching Ludwig and it’s...Mark!”
Mitchell himself is aware of all of this. “Well, I mean, some would say I’m not the most transformative actor currently working and that’s criticism I would take on the chin. Although sometimes the chin has a beard on it and sometimes it doesn’t,” he said in a recent interview with BBC’s Front Row. Though in that same interview, he was careful to distinguish his latest role. “The big difference between John and Mark from Peep Show is that Mark is a fundamentally self-serving, cowardly and bad man,” he said. “Whereas John in this, he’s doing something very brave and very honorable and we can see his fear, but if he wasn’t frightened, it wouldn’t be brave.”
Ludwig creator Mark Brotherhood came right out and said he doesn’t think people give his lead actor enough credit. “There is a pathos to this character, which he gets. You see this sort of sadness and loneliness behind John a lot of the time. He has this occasional level of childish excitement at some of the stuff that he is doing,” he told Trip Wire mag. “He is lovely and nuanced, and David knows just how to hit those notes. He has lovely, expressive eyes when he’s sad. He’s wonderful.”
Mitchell is particularly suited to the role. Now 50, he has settled into his graying beard and his cord jacket, and looks not unlike a Cambridge don. He fits seamlessly into the show’s environs, which makes sense, since Mitchell himself grew up in Oxford, though he failed to get into the university. He attended Cambridge instead where he studied history (what else?) and met his comedy partner Robert Webb (their company, Mitchell and Webb, produced Ludwig). It was with Webb that Mitchell starred on Peep Show, conceived as a Beavis and Butthead-style series which morphed into a show about two best friends—Mitchell’s strait-laced loan manager constantly butting up against Webb’s slacker. The POV camera work (innovative at the time) captured the inner monologues of both characters, notably Mark’s barely contained snottiness. “I’m wrestling with the white working class,” his brain says while interrupting a robbery, “Morse never did this!!!” Airing on Channel 4 from 2003 to 2010, Peep Show famously became the longest-running comedy in the channel’s history, and though it never got a lot of eyes, it’s now considered one of the greatest shows ever made.
That’s a hard shadow to shrug off. And it’s not like Mitchell doesn’t want to play—even live—against type. He has joked numerous times that he would love to be an intellectual, who writes novels at a clip, reads a ton, and devours theater and foreign cinema. The truth is he adores cozy crime series—Miss Marple, Poirot, Inspector Morse. And now he has his own. What could be more ideal?
