West Cork and unsolved crimes have become international television’s hot new trend. In 2021 there was a head to head between two true-crime documentaries about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, Jim Sheridan’s Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie and Netflix’s Sophie: A Murder in West Cork. And this year ITV aired its adaptation of Graham Norton’s Holding, about a fictional cold-case killing in the 1990s.
Now the Obamas are getting in on the action. Cameras start rolling next week in the fishing village of Union Hall and around Glandore on their latest production, Bodkin. Described as a “darkly comedic thriller”, it will chronicle the adventures of a “motley crew” of podcasters investigating the disappearance of three strangers in an “idyllic Irish coastal town”.
With West Cork Noir a well-trodden genre, the concept does not sound particularly original—but it represents new ground for Barack and Michelle Obama and their Higher Ground production company. Since striking a multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix, the former US president and first lady have focused on nonfiction. Barack was last seen channelling his inner David Attenborough with the natural-history documentary Our Great National Parks; Michelle has popped up hosting Waffles + Mochi, where she shared the screen with a sentient Japanese rice cake and a talking waffle. (This is in contrast to the Trump presidency, when the talking waffle was in the White House.)
Bodkin sounds like a lot of things. A Hobbit on the sex offenders’ register. A forthcoming Nintendo Switch platform game. A brand of English cider. What it doesn’t suggest is a village in west Co Cork
But Bodkin is something different: a scripted series that might struggle to feel any better designed to cash in on the global craze for west Cork and true(ish) crime. It stars Will Forte, the Saturday Night Live comedian, as Gilbert Power, an American podcaster “on the hunt for his next big story”. Gilbert’s family emigrated from Cork, we learn, and he is “hoping to discover his Irish roots”.
The cast also features Siobhán Cullen, last seen in as a “truth-seeking” Dublin journalist in The Dry, Element Pictures’ rip-roaring comedy about an alcoholic Irish woman from a family of typically Irish heavy drinkers, which for some reason has yet to air in Ireland, and Chris Walley, of Young Offenders, who plays “a typical Irish country lad — feckless, up for a laugh”.
Wait. What? Feckless and up for a laugh? The more you read about Bodkin, the less it sounds like west Cork true-crime redux and the more it sounds like Amy Adams’s Leap Year, aka Darby O’Gill: The Relationship Years. Alarm bells clang further as we discover that Bodkin is the name of the village in which the show is set.
Which leads you to wonder if the closest anyone involved in the series has been to Cork is a true-crime-podcast feed. (The credits of Bodkin’s co-show runner Alex Metcalf include Amazon’s dreadful reboot of the conspiracy thriller Utopia.) Bodkin sounds like a lot of things. A Hobbit on the sex offenders’ register. A forthcoming Nintendo Switch platform game. A brand of English cider. What it doesn’t suggest is a village in west Co Cork.
We’ve been here before, of course. Or at least some of us have. When I was a student living at home in Midleton, the nearby village of Ballycotton received the Hollywood treatment after the news that Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp were to shoot a movie there.
One late afternoon my friends and I went down to see the set for ourselves (having first driven around on the lookout for Depp, whom we’d heard was drinking in a local boozer). Ballycotton had been turned into a twee Neverland, with toe-curling signposts and shopfronts that made the town look as if it had come straight from the 1890s rather than the 1990s.
Divine Rapture was, notoriously, derailed by funding issues. That won’t be a problem in the case of Netflix and the Obamas. Still, you have to wonder, will Bodkin be a love letter to west Cork, or will the Obamas instead be party to the pumping into the world of more O’Blarney? Perhaps we should hope for the best—and brace ourselves for the diddley-dee worst.
