It is well nigh impossible to not see him as Cat.
Dwayne was a great character. I don’t seem to have a strong feeling about best DS. I guess Camille was probably the best.
The accents are all over the place. But I can usually ignore that part.
Thank you. So many people think because I’m a woman I should love this movie. I don’t. Very much.
I like Ben Miller (except for his Professor T), and I like how he played Richard Poole. I like his slightly tetchy relationships with his fellow police – especially Camille. There’s something about Kris Marshall that always puts me off a little. Is it because he reminds me of a giant Opie? He was o.k. I stopped watching regularing after him, but I’ve dipped my toe in a few episodes. The others were pretty forgettable.
I liked him well enough in the role in this show, but he looks more than a little like my brother-in-law (who is kind of a pompous bite in the ass), so I can’t watch those episodes without seeing my BIL. 
Of course Danny John-Jules Tobi Bakare, and Tahj Miles were all born in London. Don Warrington was actually born on Trinidad (but raised in London).
I liked Kris Neville the best overall as a character. Ben Miller was almost unwatchable except for the aha scenes, where he suddenly put all the clues together while others stared agape. It probably helped that the plots felt fresh those first few seasons before you could spot the impossible answer as soon as you saw the murder because they had already done it six times. (Or worse, had them physically improbable or impossible.)
Ralf Little I hated so much that I stopped watching the show. I’ll have to try coming back to see how they handle Don Gilet.
Ralf Little started bad but they had him grow a lot and by the end of his run, it was a good fit.
Don Gilet also fitted into the role well after an iffy start, a quicker adjustment than Little. He’s the most like the first detective I would say.
Well, the awfulness of the plots didn’t help any. I’m still not sure they can overcome that mountain.
DiP is akin to “cozy mysteries*” – it’s usually not too serious, even though it’s about murder, it’s not gory (and the murders nearly always happen off-screen), it often has humorous and/or romantic subplots, and I am pretty sure that a fair amount of its appeal to its fans is the Caribbean setting, and attractive young actors.
They aren’t really meant to be heavy-duty (or even particularly well-written) plots, I don’t think. It’s popcorn television, and it’s proven to be a popular formula for its audience.
*- I don’t think that it really qualifies as a “cozy,” as one of the hallmarks of that subgenre is that the detective is a amateur, and not a police officer or professional detective.
I put it on par with Murdoch Mysteries and Father Brown.
Agreed. It’s “light,” as murder mysteries go, but not as overtly over-the-top silly as, say, Shakespeare & Hathaway.
We don’t watch Murdoch Mysteries. I think my wife used to watch Father Brown when it was on.
We do watch that. It cracks me up that the young guy keeps coming up with disguises that wouldn’t fool anybody… except for the people on the show.
You don’t have to sell me. My wife and I are fans of popcorn mysteries, both books and tv series, preferring them to the more common norm today of stretching one case out over a season. We made it through at least eleven or twelve seasons of DiP so you can’t say we dismissed it. We even watched all of Shakespeare & Hathaway, but mostly because Ovation shows it all the time.
But popcorn notoriously has a reputation for getting stale. That’s my end point unless a fresh new batch brings the flavor back.
Oh, absolutely, and while I watch (and reasonably enjoy) Death in Paradise, it’s mostly by osmosis, because my wife, or my parents (if I’m visiting them) are watching it. It’s extremely formulaic, and they’ve used that same formula for over a hundred episodes. I imagine that, for some people, they want that same flavor of popcorn every time, and DiP delivers that.
I also find that the newer actors in the more recent seasons lack the charm and interest of the original cast, but that’s just my particular preference.
Series creator Robert Thorogood left the show after series 11 and was only doing one episode a series for several years before that. It might explain the drop in quality.
He wrote a couple of novels which have been dramatized as the Marlowe Murder Club. Thorogood had a penchant for locked room mysteries, which shows up in Marlowe.
(Marlow the town, not Marlowe the author. One is the ultimate pretty quiet riverside commuter town, the other died in squalid and mysterious circumstances, still investigated and argued over).
Meta factoid about DiP casting: in one episode, one of the suspects is played by Caroline Proust, who is better known as the headstrong cop Laure Bertaud in the long-running French series Engrenages (Spiral).
I voted for DI Mooney, because I liked how he wasn’t a klutzy fish-out-of-water, and instead had a more realistic motive for acclimatising to being on St Marie, i.e. dealing with his wife’s death. I would happily watch a spin-off with his character. He does cameo in the Australian spin-off, Return To Paradise, but only briefly.
Me too! 