It's essentially Miss Marple in a cassock and occasional soutane as far as
the content goes.
The thing is, Chesterton's Brown does very little active detecting. In the
later-set stories, Flambeau does do some leg-work, but Chesterton's point
was that the antecedent knowledge of human nature and orthodox ontology
gave Brown the perceptiveness to see through to the heart of a situation.
He didn't do much material investigation.
The show substitutes standard amateur-detective plots for anything remotely
Chestertonian. They also replace Brown's reliance on (what Chesterton saw
as) fundamental orthodoxy, especially as regards human nature, with a
generic attractive to the 21st century general humanism. It's also badly
researched; it looked very much to me as though the writers couldn't really
tell the difference between the RCs and the C of E, which is actually
minimal in practice today in terms of integration into society - the C of E
has become in practice less familiar and the RCs have become far more
thoroughly integrated - but was significant in the period.
There really isn't much left, after all that's gone.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-07-17 08:19 pm (UTC)It's essentially Miss Marple in a cassock and occasional soutane as far as the content goes.
The thing is, Chesterton's Brown does very little active detecting. In the later-set stories, Flambeau does do some leg-work, but Chesterton's point was that the antecedent knowledge of human nature and orthodox ontology gave Brown the perceptiveness to see through to the heart of a situation. He didn't do much material investigation.
The show substitutes standard amateur-detective plots for anything remotely Chestertonian. They also replace Brown's reliance on (what Chesterton saw as) fundamental orthodoxy, especially as regards human nature, with a generic attractive to the 21st century general humanism. It's also badly researched; it looked very much to me as though the writers couldn't really tell the difference between the RCs and the C of E, which is actually minimal in practice today in terms of integration into society - the C of E has become in practice less familiar and the RCs have become far more thoroughly integrated - but was significant in the period.
There really isn't much left, after all that's gone.