The New Yorker:

In “Ludwig,” David Mitchell tries to solve mysteries—and the problem of being a person in the world.

By Sarah Larson

There’s a gamelike element to being a detective—the seeking of hidden information, the identification of patterns, the piecing together of clues, the “Eureka!” of discovery. Several legendary fictional detectives have been expert game players and puzzle solvers. Inspector Morse had a passion for crosswords; Lord Peter Wimsey decoded ciphers. Hercule Poirot, that shrewd know-it-all, solved a chess-related murder by scrutinizing a Ruy Lopez opening and the unconventional use of a white bishop. (The piece had been electrified.) Part of the pleasure of reading detective stories, and of watching them on TV, is the gratification of getting to play along—with the investigation and with the seductive idea that human misdeeds can be definitively understood. That idea feels especially appealing right now. It’s a good time, in other words, for the British detective comedy “Ludwig,” on BritBox starting this week, in which mysteries become actual puzzles, solved by an ingenious maker of crosswords and cryptograms. Created and written by Mark Brotherhood, “Ludwig” was a hit in the U.K. and has been renewed for a second season. It stars David Mitchell, who excels at embodying a certain kind of appealingly awkward everyman—the kind whose white-hot rumination, no matter how clever, yields few social rewards. Here, Mitchell is a grizzled, reclusive homebody who prefers puzzles to people, and who must suddenly reckon with both, in the outside world. Viewers emerging from the work-at-home era may recognize themselves. But, unlike most of us, Ludwig happens to be a genius. “Two points above, actually,” he says in one episode. “But I find that never helps when it comes to . . . chatting.”

Mitchell has long performed as half of a comedy duo with Robert Webb; meme-conscious Americans will recognize “Are we the baddies?,” from their show “That Mitchell and Webb Look,” in which two S.S. officers fret about their uniforms’ skull insignia. The rudely brilliant “Peep Show,” co-created by Jesse Armstrong (“Succession”), featured them as hapless odd-couple flatmates—Mitchell the uptight overthinker, Webb the freewheeling oaf. (“She knows about cubits, she’s not comfortable in her own skin—she’s one of me!” Mitchell’s character excitedly thinks about an attractive shoe-store clerk.) In “Ludwig,” Mitchell is in a kind of comedy duo with himself. Primarily, he plays John Taylor, a man with an identical twin, James. But John also has another double: he’s known to fans by his nom de puzzle, Ludwig. (The opening scene has notes of “Für Elise,” and Beethoven motifs recur throughout.) He spends his days alone, in his late parents’ house, happily working, surrounded by easels, a shelf full of Ludwig volumes—cryptograms, logic puzzles, crosswords, mathematical puzzles, codices—and family photographs, with Mitchell in duplicate. As the story begins, James goes missing, and his wife, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), begs John to help find him—by impersonating him. Ooh! It isn’t easy to get a hermit to leave the house, but these are extraordinary times, and out he goes.

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