Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

This is my occasional foray into the TV shows I watch that you may have missed...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency started out as a book by the late, great Douglas Adams. You've heard of him. He wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels.

When I was in high school, I went through a Douglas Adams phase. I started with the Hitchhiker novels, and then I read the other novels he wrote. It's not a long list. But so much of the books stayed with me. Dirk Gently introduced the idea of Zen navigation.

Anyway, when I heard BBC America was doing a TV show, I knew I had to see it. It had been decades since I'd read the books, but as the series wasn't following them anyway, that didn't much matter.

The show was on last year. And it's weird. Very weird. Just recently (while catching up on Doctor Who), I saw that they were doing a marathon of the show. And that led to me discovering that there's a season two coming. Hooray!

So, anyway, what is a holistic detective? There's a bunch of gobbledygook about the interconnectedness of all things to solve the whole crime. Or not. It's been a while since I read the books. It's all an excuse for the plot to be all over the place.

And it is all over the place. There's time travel. Body swapping. The murder that starts off the show takes place in a hotel room, and it apparently happened by shark. Finally, there's a small black kitten that ends up being incredibly important.

The freaky thing is, all the loose ends do tie up at the end. By episode two or three you might not think so. You might have trouble following everything that's happening. But there is a coherent thread throughout, and the final explanation makes the whole season make sense.

I will warn you that some of this is very violent. There's a "holistic assassin" who racks up quite the body count before the ending. And I did mention death by shark in hotel room?

But if you keep with it (and you like weird), you will be rewarded. It may not appear to be sci fi at the beginning, but it is. Way out there sci fi, naturally.

If you get BBC America, it is available on their OnDemand and on their app. (Although, my OnDemand only shows the first two episodes.) And my cursory internet search shows that it may be on Netflix and Hulu. (Same search shows new episodes starting in October.)

The trailer for season 1:

Willing to give this a try? Or does it sound too weird for you? Have you heard of it before? Or seen it?