J.K. Rowling’s willingness to weigh in on transgender issues has made her a culture-wars combatant since before the turn of the decade. But it hasn’t appeared to affect her lucrative relationship with Warner Bros. Discovery, which is scheduled to start filming an HBO series based on her Harry Potter novels this summer.
And artistically, the results of that relationship have been rewarding. On average, Rowling’s work has fared as well onscreen as that of any best-selling writer, beginning with the Potter films and continuing with the highly entertaining Fantastic Beasts movies. That winning streak has continued on television, where “C.B. Strike,” the BBC and HBO show based on the books she writes under the name Robert Galbraith, has been one of the better British mystery series of recent years.
Things get problematic, though, with the arrival on Thursday of “C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart,” based on the sixth of Rowling’s novels about the private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott.
The four-episode season, on HBO, is still a well-made whodunit with two wonderful performances at its heart. But the human element that made earlier installments of “C.B. Strike” excellent is less in evidence here, overshadowed by a not-very-interesting topicality that seems likely to be an outgrowth of Rowling’s real-world experience.
“The Ink Black Heart” faced a challenge from the start: Its source is a thousand-page doorstop of a novel that is littered with replications of group chats, tweets and text exchanges. The book is an exhausting typographical obstacle course; that each of its 107 chapters begins with a snippet of poetry as an epigraph does not make reading it any easier.
Tom Edge, who has written the bulk of the TV series, and Sue Tully, the show’s longtime director, wisely make no attempt to put those reams of online chatter onscreen, settling for the occasional spoken reference. And they have condensed the story adroitly, eliminating whole plot lines to focus on the central investigation. They have not, however, been able to make the case much more interesting.
It’s a homicide involving the creators of a macabre online cartoon, and the suspects are a thinly drawn, too-numerous group of obsessive fans, romantic and business partners and other hangers-on. You sense that Rowling’s interest was less in revealing the killer than in grinding a particular ax — the story’s message is that the successful artist is defenseless against the amateur who “thinks that your characters basically belong to him.”
It would help if we cared about these people, but the quickly dispatched victim is virtually the only character who evinces any talent or depth of feeling. (One especially air-headed suspect notes that she is unlikely to be the killer because, as she says, “I’m antifa.”) The season has a slightly sour atmosphere along with an airless, puzzle-solving approach to its mystery.
This renders “The Ink Black Heart” a disappointment in the wake of earlier chapters like “Lethal White” and “Troubled Blood,” which were textured family dramas that used crime-solving as a framework. It still has the show’s great strength, however: the relationship between Cormoran and Robin — respectful, deeply affectionate, forever on the verge of romantic — and the enormously appealing performances in those roles by Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger.
The characters’ continuing, perhaps never-ending courtship dance could easily get stale, but the two actors find ways to keep it fresh and surprising. Grainger is continually excellent as the no-nonsense Robin, but the new season is perhaps more of a showcase for Burke’s quiet, contained portrayal of Cormoran, which nails the detective’s blend of bullish force and awkward compassion. (Also vital is Ruth Sheen as the dour, hilarious office manager, Pat.) You can enjoy them in “The Ink Black Heart,” despite its imperfections, and hope for an adaptation of the next book, “The Running Grave,” which puts the focus back on family matters.
