The most watched series in the United Kingdom is a gentle mystery for detective fans

BarcelonaAt a time when series consumption is dominated by streaming platforms and audiences are highly fragmented, achieving a fiction that attracts a large volume of viewers can be an impossible mission. The BBC, the British television broadcaster, seems to have hit the mark with Ludwig, a gentle mystery that with its second season has become the most-watched fiction in the United Kingdom since the beginning of the year. According to the BBC, the first episode of the season has accumulated 9.1 million viewers in its first 28 days of availability. In Spain, Ludwig can be watched on Movistar Plus+, which premieres the second installment this Thursday, October 15.

The series stars a solitary (and brilliant) puzzle creator who publishes under the pseudonym Ludwig. His real name is John Taylor. His existence is entirely ordinary and his appearance, with corduroy jackets as a hallmark, looks old-fashioned. In the first season, his habitual reclusion was interrupted by a call from his sister-in-law Lucy, who asked him to travel to Cambridge urgently. Once there, John discovered that his twin brother, James, a police detective, had mysteriously disappeared. Lucy proposed that he pose as James and start working at the police station to find clues as to where he might be. While impersonating his brother, John ended up solving various mysteries using his knowledge of logic, a method that surprised his police colleagues who could not quite understand James's sudden change in personality.

In the second season, John can no longer maintain the deception, but that does not mean he stops working with the police. Now, the puzzle creator holds the position of advisor and gives his opinion on those cases that seem impossible to solve. Meanwhile, his brother remains missing and Lucy continues to pressure John to investigate what happened to him.

A genre on the rise

The success of Ludwig or of films like Sheep Detective, released on Prime Video, demonstrates the good moment of cozy mystery. "The truth is that we are living in turbulent times. The golden age of crime –as they call it– was the 1930s; it was then that people immersed themselves in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie. That was also an extremely turbulent era. We hope that this boom in the cozy crime genre has a happier outcome than that decade," reflected David Mitchell, who plays the lead character, in an interview with the BBC.

One of the keys to this genre is that comedy carries significant weight. "The balance between mystery and humor was an aspect we were quite worried about getting right, especially in the first season. It is a dramedy, not a pure drama. Although, in my opinion, any drama without comic elements is incomplete. The main axis is to get the viewer interested in the plot and the characters; comedy acts as a complement. The risk with Ludwig was including too many jokes and ending up undermining the plot, making it seem absurd or a parody. You have to maintain a basically serious tone, but incorporating comic elements that are credible for the characters," remarks Mitchell.

Ludwig not only achieves good audience figures, but also has the support of specialized critics. Upon the premiere of the second season, The Guardian gave it five stars, its maximum score. "Long live this extravagant, corduroy-clad mystery," noted the newspaper's critic, Sarah Dempster.