The Trippy Mystery Series You Can Binge On Hulu
If you're not familiar with "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," it's difficult to overstate just how Lewis Carroll-level peculiar the next few paragraphs are going to be.
Starting from the top: The series, which is available to stream for the price of a Hulu subscription, is based on the second best-known works of British author and beloved oddball Douglas Adams, the mind behind all five books in the "Hitchhiker's Guide" trilogy. Those stories are all about spaceships that run on improbability and pan-dimensional mice commissioning the creation of the Earth and the two-headed President of the Galaxy and the morality of serving food made from animals that beg to be eaten. For "Dirk Gently," Adams left all of that behind him and decided to get real weird with stuff.
As a result, the BBC's adaptation, which ran for two seasons in 2016 and 2017, gives viewers some of the most bonkers combinations of sights and sounds that they could hope for in a television series. It's all a little perplexing — one minute you're looking at Elijah Wood and his never-not-carded-at-the-bar face, adorned in a bellboy outfit and looking borderline adoptable. The next, there's a room full of as much destruction and as many mutilated corpses as you can hope to get away with at a TV-14 rating.
Dirk Gently is the funkiest show you never watched
The BBC series is based on Douglas Adams' two completed books in the Dirk Gently series, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" and "The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul." It tells the story of the titular Dirk, played by Samuel Barnett of "Penny Dreadful." Dirk is a detective who solves mysteries in his own particular way, foregoing conventional deduction and investigation in favor of a belief that everything in the universe is interconnected and that things will pretty much work themselves out. The show's first season sees the detective making friends with Todd Brotzman (Elijah Wood), a hotel bellhop and born loser who finds himself in need of assistance after a routine checkup on a penthouse suite uncovers a gruesome bloodbath. Also, and this might or might not be related, there appears to be a second Elijah Wood running around the hotel wearing a fur coat and screaming at people.
The show just gets weirder from there, and fans won't be able to get enough of it. "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" currently holds a 95% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a coveted 100% critical approval rating hanging around the neck of its second season.