Showcase: Endgame
Thanks to tarlanx, I am now thoroughly addicted to Endgame, a Canadian show about a Russian chess grandmaster who witnessed his fiancee's death while in Vancouver for a chess competition and is now an agoraphobe who lives at the Huxley Hotel. He needs a way to pay his massive hotel bills, so he begins to solve crimes from the safety of the hotel. Because he can't go outside, he applies chess theory to construct mental models of crime scenes and runs various scenarios of what could have happened, often walking into them himself. He amasses a group of 'Baker street irregulars' who go out to crime scenes and report back to him.
There are so many reasons to love this show. Shawn Doyle as Grandmaster Arkady Balagan is freaking brilliant. He manages to be captivating and clever and infuriating all at once. His body language and delivery really define the eccentricity and genius of the character. The supporting characters are great, and you can really see them start to come together to form a network as you go through the episodes. My favourite character is Alcina, the Guatemalan housekeeper at the Huxley who is brilliant and kind and no-nonsense. Close second is Samuel Besht, a.k.a. the put-upon little graduate student/aspiring chess fanatic who Balagan picks on/reluctantly mentors depending on his mood and the amount of vodka he's had for the day.
Click to viewI am totally going to be following this series from now on. We Yanks don't really get it here on television, so I'm slightly afraid about Endgame's popularity in America (number of viewers have apparently been decreasing, A-H-H. Don't do this to me again. I'm still getting over Dresden Files and Stargate Atlantis, and at least that had five seasons), hence this post and me telling random people I know about how good the show is. I really hope this show gets another season and goes somewhere. It looks like it has a lot of potential to be amazing.
Endgame season 1 episodes on TV-Links. We have our sources.