C.B. Strike premiered eons ago in the cable and straming world. How do we know? Because when it premiered in the U.S. in 2018, the show aired on Cinemax. That’s when Cinemax still had original programming (remember The Knick?) and HBO hadn’t yet lifted the “Max” moniker for their streaming service (HBO Max started in 2020). But the stories based on the mysteries that J.K. Rowling writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith have proven to be so durable, that a sixth series has been produced, this time airing on the HBO mothership.
C.B. STRIKE: THE INK BLACK HEART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman walks down a London street, and spies a baloon shaped like a horse.
The Gist: The woman is Robin Ellacot (Holliday Grainger), and the baloon is being held by Cormoran “C.B.” Strike (Tom Burke), her partner in the investigative business that has his name on the door. He takes her to dinner, and there Robin talks about how badly she messed up her marriage. “I didn’t want to be there,” she tells Strike, knowing that Strike is the one she wanted to be with. As they walk after dinner, Strike leans in to kiss Robin, which generates an unexpected reaction from her.
A few days later, Strike and Midge (Tupele Dorgu) one of the agency’s investigators, are working a case when a woman named Edie Ledwell (Mirren Mack) comes to the office, looking specifically for Robin. Edie is the co-creator of an online animated series called The Ink Black Heart, and she is being threatened by an online troll who calls themselves “Anomie.” Exhausted from buying herself in work, Robin refuses to take the case, but Edie ends up leaving the files she has in the bathroom.
She returns the material to Edie’s agent, Alan Yeoman (Ben Caplan), who tells her how things have been since Edie broke up with her boyfriend and collaborator, Josh Blay (Jacob Abraham). Not long after, Edie is found murdered. Strike, who has been avoiding Robin since she rebuffed his kiss, comforts her. After Robin is questioned by DCI Richard Murphy (Stephen Hagan) and a woman named Angela Darwish (Badria Timimi), Strike starts looking into Wally Cardew (Kevin Bishop), a voice over actor whom Edie fired from the show for videos he posted with alt-right opinions. The pair is eventually hired by Edie’s uncle, Grant Ledwell (David Westhead).
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart is the sixth season of the BBC series that’s based on the books written by J.K. Rowling, under the pseudonum Robert Galbraith (Rowling is an executive producer of the series). Name a British detective series and it’ll be similar to C.B. Strike.
Our Take: C.B. Strike (called Strike in the UK and other countries) has been around since 2018, so at this point viewers know what they’re going to get from a season of the series. Each season will cover one mystery in two to four episodes, the pace will be somewhat leisurely, and we’ll get a lot of insight into the lives of Strike, Robin and now the people who work for them. Your enjoyment of this current season, The Ink Black Heart, will determine how much patience you have for this show’s pacing.
This is the kind of mystery that many British mystery shows dispatch in anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours. The fact that this one is being given about 4 hours to settle this mystery means that there’s going to be a lot of time for interpersonal stuff.
And, given how far along we are with Strike and Robin, that’s going to be the crux of the interpersonal story in this series. Robin tells her friend Ilsa Herbert (Caitlin Innes Edwards)] that she pulled back from Strike’s kiss attempt because she got scared that entering into a relationship with him would mess up their friendship and business partnership. So we imagine that she’s going to struggle with this during this season, and there seems to be plenty of time to explore this aspect.
Burke continues to play Strike as a guy whose family history still works against his happiness, but he seems to have hope now that Robin is unattached. There are still scenes that remind us that he’s an amputee, like when he tries to climb a staircase to follow someone but his leg hurts as it butts up against his prosthetic. It’s not as overt as it’s been in other seasons, and now that the agency is doing well enough to employ multiple people, he’s got help.
Will we see more about Midge, or Sam (Jack Greenlees), or the agency’s sardonic receptionist Pat (Ruth Sheen)? Maybe. But we may also just get a lot of scenes where Robin plays the online RPG that “Anomie” made based on The Ink Black Heart. With the space writer Tom Edge has for this story, anything is possible.
Sex and Skin: Robin dons a disguise to take an art class in order to watch two people of interest. One of them, Pez (James Nelson-Joyce) is a nude model for the class.
Parting Shot: In the RPG, Anomie admits to killing Edie. “And you are welcome,” the character says.
Sleeper Star: We actually liked the animation from the episode of The Ink Black Heart that Robin watched. It makes us think that this show’s writers could make an animated series if they wanted.
Most Pilot-y Line: Strike follows Cardew, and sees him making a man-on-the-street video in a park. In front of one of the people he stops, he puts on an old-fashioned and racist Asian voice, ticking off the person he’s talking to. We would think that his racism would be more subtle than that.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the mystery in C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart is a bit slowly-paced, we do appreciate the elbow room the writers have to explore the lives and relationships of Strike, Robin and the other series regulars.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘C.B. Strike: The Ink Black Heart’ On HBO, Where Strike And Robin Investigate The Death Of A Cartoonist appeared first on Decider.
