Life of Brian

I don’t know how I found the show Harrow on Hulu, maybe it was a recommendation, but it was a mystery of the week type show from Australia about a pathologist. The first episode opens with someone in a boat in the dark of night. They have a body in a tarp which they cover with some kind of powder before tossing into the deep. After the intro montage we get into the show and we get our autopsy case of the week going, but it is a cold case that has nothing to do with the show’s opening.

Early on we get a shot of where he calls home and it is a sailboat parked on the waterfront with a great view of downtown Brisbane. Wait a minute, coroner lives on a boat, where have I seen that before? I had to go back and look because I wasn’t sure, Jack Klugman in a nearly 50 year old TV show called Quincy, a rule bending coroner solving murders weekly who also lives on a sailboat. And while there are similarities, the TV landscape has changed in the intervening years, so that we now have almost always a thread that runs through all the shows in a season and there is always more ancillary, family & co-workers, characters that also get their own story arcs too. Oh, and we get a complicated love interest for the leading man.

Halfway through episode one Harrow is called to the scene of a body found in the water that was incased in cement, aah, the show’s opening. But for some reason our hero seems to be a bit worried about this concrete encased case. At the end of the episode we find out why – the man dumping the body is non other than our leading man, Doctor Daniel Harrow. After dodging what seemed like a thousand near misses in being caught for murdering his ex-wife’s husband and dumping his concrete encrusted body, by season ender he is totally in the clear. As Harrow celebrates with a glass of wine on the deck of his boat he is shot through the gut.

Episode one of season two he gets out of the hospital, a new girlfriend (who later turns out to be his new co-worker) and the gist of the second season’s over arcing story line. The fellow who shot him has a grudge against him because Harrow solved the case that sent him to prison. The kicker is that everyone in Harrow’s world, except him, believes that our villain died in a prison fire.

So, in between solving the case of the week Harrow tries to prove the man is alive all the while being tormented as the bad guy screws with his emotions by harassing and setting up his family members for arrests. In episode two our pathologist is hung off the side of a skyscraper, in the forth he has to swim in a dangerous crocodile infested river to get a body, in the sixth he gets locked in a refrigerated shipping container and in #8 he is buried alive by our “dead” villain. Of course at the very end of the season ender episodes he proves the bad guy is alive and he saves his daughter’s life from his nemesis. At the very end he hands this bad guy a rose that has some sort of poison on the thorns which kills the guy and we fade to black.

I was unsure if I was going to watch the 3rd and final season, but thought I’ll watch the first show and see how it goes. After about 10 minutes in and they are doing an autopsy on the case of the week Harrow wants to know why no one has done any lab work on the deceased. This triggered me to wonder why there was no mention of an autopsy or blood work on last season’s bad guy’s death. Surely if a just caught police prisoner dies after being loaded into a paddy wagon alive there would have been an investigation.

Season 3 of Harrow remains unwatched.