Dove says that true-crime stories aren’t real journalism, and while we’re led to believe she is an ace reporter, she seems unfamiliar with one of the core aspects of news gathering: earning the trust of potential sources. She is surly and rude to nearly everyone she meets. She breaks into a library after hours just because she’s impatient. Back in London, she had promised to protect a whistle-blower’s identity, but his name leaked somehow, and he later killed himself. This arc never fully meshes with the rest of the show, and it plays out mostly in terse phone calls. But everything with Dove is so one-note, it’s hard to see the specifics of her disrespect. Similarly, Gilbert’s money trouble and failing marriage — more phone calls — feel like tacked-on inventions rather than enriching character depth.
Will there ever be a show in which a female journalist doesn’t sleep with a source or subject? The search continues. Emmy falls for the local tech wunderkind and Dove for the sharp funeral director. Gilbert too becomes awfully enmeshed, befriending Seamus (David Wilmot), a local fisherman with a, yes, fishy past. Forte and Wilmot have the most interesting chemistry in the show: Gilbert is eager for good sound bites and Seamus loves to pontificate, but their deeper purposes are at odds. Neither can fully mask his prickly distrust, but both are desperate for the connection anyway. It’s a dangerous, fruitful combo.
Everywhere our podcasters go, they are met with mild derision. Will anyone really listen to a show like that? they are repeatedly asked. Well … not if these are the people making it. “Bodkin” has a seemingly viable mystery at its center, but Dove’s stubbornness means no one wants to open up to her, and Gilbert embodies the solipsistic triteness the show is critiquing but not quite effectively spoofing. Over and over, he speaks of the power of story, how stories shape the world, how storytelling is actually everything. “In the end, we’re all just stories,” he says at one point, and later: “What are we without our stories?”
Superficially, “Bodkin” has all the makings of a treat — there are plenty of snazzy one-liners and touching reveries as well as some fresh and inventive violence. Many of its twists do work, and there is plenty to critique about the true-crime industry and its mawkishness. We all love a country mouse outsmarting the city slicker, and the show, shot on location in Ireland, makes marvelous use of Bodkin’s geography, the history of its land.
But as with many true-crime podcasts, all these evocative elements together amount to a story that is ultimately unsatisfying. “Are you doing that thing where you say it’s about one thing, but it’s actually about something else?” a woman in a bar asks Gilbert after he explains why he’s in town. No, he says, he doesn’t do that kind of show. Maybe “Bodkin” should have considered it.