The Detectorists achieves that rarest of all television distinctions: It’s not like anything else on the air.
It’s a British comedy about two middle-aged guys whose passion is metal detecting. How often can you ever say that about a TV show?
Season 2 of The Detectorists premieres Monday on Acorn TV (acorn.tv), the go-to place for English-language shows you won’t see on U.S. networks.
And by the way, you don’t need to have seen Season 1 to appreciate the droll and often rather touching humor of the new episodes.
Mackenzie Crook stars as Andy and Toby Jones as his BFF Lance (top), both members of the Danebury Metal Detecting Club.
If you’ve ever seen metal-detecting enthusiasts, you know exactly how Andy and Lance look as they walk through the British countryside carrying devices that look vaguely like a floor duster. If you’re too polite to say the pastime strikes you as a little quirky, go ahead and spit it out, because that’s an entirely fair description for the crowd we meet in The Detectorists.
“Detectorists” is, incidentally, the title by which the club prefers to describe those who perform this work.
Like most detectorists, Andy and Lance seem to almost never find anything. They head out to their target field in the morning, walk back and forth swinging their detectors from side to side, stop to eat a sandwich for lunch, then do it some more before they quit for the day.
Most of the time they seem to end up with the figurative equivalent of a beer can, which doesn’t stop them from repeating the drill the next day.
Now all by itself, this would have limited comic possibilities. Fortunately, the lives of Andy and Lance are more nuanced than they seem.
Andy, in particular, has a dream. He wants to be an archaeologist, and metal detecting is a related avocation he can pursue while he works toward his degree in archaeology.
The problem is that he’s 43. He and his wife Becky (Rachael Stirling) have a 3-month-old son, Stan. So he’s already halfway through what should have been his career, and that produces some pressure.
Becky has a job, which she hates. Becky also remembers vividly how they used to talk about traveling, about having adventures, about seeing the world. She’d still like to do that. It’s just a little more complicated now than it would have been when they were 22.
We’ve seen less of Lance’s life, but this season we suddenly get a major development that puts him in a different light and threatens to change his own world as well.
Most of their personal dramas arrive with small pings rather than major explosions, however, and that makes them all the more amusing against the backdrop of the Metal Detecting Club, which does seem to be a repository for all the eccentricity of the hobby.
The story advances when a young German man seeks the club’s help in finding the wreckage of a plane that was shot down during the war. But The Detectorists doesn’t rely on high drama to move forward. It’s a show full of small, seemingly rational and logical steps that collectively add up to the best kind of Brit humor: droll and subtle, with straight faces all around.
The gently comic tone also keeps Andy and Lance from becoming simply sad, which could be a possibility and would make The Detectorists impossible to watch.
Instead, it’s intriguing and amusing. Like all good comedy, it illuminates larger matters with its perceptive portrayal of the small ones.