HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

Wisely, series creator Max Landis has chosen to honor the spirit of the author and his character in “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” as opposed to slavishly replicating the novel to the letter. (This may also explain in part why the books haven’t spawned a film franchise.) As others who have attempted to adapt his work in the past have found, this is exceedingly difficult if not impossible: The dry, imaginative jocularity that powers “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” has worked magnificently in radio broadcasts, audio books and the page, but something seems to wither in the translation to the screen, as audiences witnessed in the 2005 movie. Whereas “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” has a somewhat linear story, Adams’ lesser-known “Dirk Gently” books present the reader with a tangle of concepts and universal phenomena appearing to have nothing to do with one another at first, before eventually tumbling into an interconnected pattern.Įven after getting a handle on those elements, a TV producer still faces the challenge of channeling Adams’ style and doing justice to his characters.

It also tests the viewer’s love for Adams, a man who melded comedy and science fiction to brilliant, near inimitable effect with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”Īdams had a facility for conceptualizing surreal, preposterous places and characters and bringing them to life with amusing prose that dizzily waltzed his heroes from one adventure to the next. Whether a person falls in love with him in BBC America’s new series “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,” premiering Saturday at 9 p.m., depends entirely on his or her relationship to all things holistic. He’s not a genius or keen observer of details actually, and he’s annoyingly reliant on the woo-woo. It’s a tad woo-woo for the average Jane, in other words, indicative of ridiculous business a few steps removed from pure hokum.ĭouglas Adams had to be familiar with these notions when he invented Dirk Gently, a self-described “holistic detective.” Dirk Gently doesn’t search for fingerprints or DNA evidence to solve his crimes. Those who only know it as a New Age-y description likely associate the term with crystal swingers inhaling sage smoke, smiling beatifically between sips of yam juice. By definition, holistic simply means “characterized by comprehension of the parts of something as intimately interconnected and explicable only by reference to the whole.” How an individual reacts depends on what the word means to him or her. The term “holistic” tends to be met either with understanding or cynical rejection.

Holistic detective agency