Midsomer Murders: "The Wolf Hunter of Little Worthy" (Bentley Productions, All3 Media, ITV, PBS, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 5) I watched a Midsomer Murders episode on KPBS which for once was a relatively recent one (originally aired April 19, 2021) called “The Wolf Hunter of Little Worthy.” It’s about a “glamping” camp started in the village of Little Worthy in (the fictional) Midsomer County in central England, run by a (straight) couple named Brandon and Rowan Yarrow (Ferdinand Kingsley and Maimie McCoy) which does a lot of New Age-y stuff, and the complaints of various local townspeople, including Pat and Ronnie Everett (Mark Williams and Siobhan Redmond), who’ve been coming to Little Worthy to spend their summers for 37 years but are making a big public show of disgust over the antics of the “glampers.” Actually the Everetts are not only quite happy about the camp but are even investing money in it. The “Wolf Hunter” was a neighborhood meme started by local café owner Mel Wallace (Sinéad Matthews) as a contest, won by Steve Skelton (Matt McCooey), who’s living in Little Worthy with his teenage daughter Josie (Molly Harris). Steve is under the illusion that winning the contest and creating the rural equivalent of an urban legend about werewolves will win back the affections of Josie’s mother, which it won’t. The “Wolf Hunter” actually materializes and starts killing people for real, starting with Jez Gladberry (Kojo Attah), a hot-looking Black man who was working on fixing the camp’s hot tub when he was suddenly lured away by a text and ultimately killed by a man dressed as the “Wolf Hunter” and wearing gloves with long metal talons, something like Wolverine. (I was really enjoying at Kojo Attah and looking forward to seeing more of him – especially those prominent nipples poking through his T-shirt – so I was disappointed when he was dispatched in the first act.)

The next one to die was Jez’s girlfriend, Kelly Kirk-Lees (Polly Gilbert), though in the meantime Rowan Yarrow is nearly parboiled when someone takes an axe to the temperature control on her sauna, causing the heat to rise uncontrollably until someone (we don’t see who) rescues her in the nick of time. There are also the predictable clashes between older people – including Jez’s father, artist Eric Gladberry (Brian Bovell), who wanted Jez to follow in his footsteps instead of just being a handyman – and younger folks who spend oodles of time on line. Part of that is a rivalry between an old-style pub called “The Lamb” and a new, modern coffeehouse called “The Hub” run by Mel and set up to attract on-line users with free wi-fi. “The Hub”’s computer servers are clearly visible in the coffeehouse’s main room. Eventually the lead police, Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and Detective Sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix, not one of the more interesting assistants on this show but O.K. if a bit too stuck-up for my taste), see an old photo of the Everetts in which Ronnie is visibly pregnant even though the couple have no children. It turns out that they did have a child but put her up for adoption, and the child is Mel. It also turns out that she helped create the “Wolf Hunter” mythos, and the detail she included was that the “Wolf Hunter” was abandoned in the woods before being raised by a wolf pack after being abandoned by his human parents. The cops eventually arrest Mel for the murders, and it turns out her motive was that she was having an affair with Jez Gladberry until he started seeing Kelly Kirk-Lees as well. Eventually Mel reconciles with her natural parents, Pat and Ronnie Everett, who at the end promise to stand by her no matter what she’s done. This was an oddly emotional ending for a show that mostly coasts along on its own quirkiness, but I liked this episode and am glad I stayed up to watch it.