Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Darby And Joan’ On Acorn TV, Where Two Strangers Encounter Mysteries Across Australia

It feels like many of the shows offered by Acorn TV are similar, just with different settings. Episodic mysteries are connected by an overall story arc involving the show’s main characters. So, for the most part, those shows rely on veteran actors with considerable charm. It’s the formula that made Agatha Raisin a hit for the streamer, as well as a number of other shows. Now Acorn has Bryan Brown and Gretta Scacchi in a show with a similar format. Does it work?

DARBY AND JOAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man calls his wife, who is complaining about the rain in London. He says he’s at a tapas restaurant in Barcelona, but he’s actually in the middle of the desert in the Australian outback.

The Gist: We then see Joan Kirkhope (Greta Scacchi) at a morgue in Australia, IDing the body of that man in the desert, who is her husband Ian (John Waters). Six months later, she is packing to to go back to Australia and try to piece together why he was there and how he died, against the wishes of her daughter Rebecca (Anna McGahan).

As she’s driving to her first destination in her rented RV, she’s nearly run off the road by an SUV. She avoids the collision but the SUV flips over. She pulls out Jack Darby (Bryan Brown) and his dog Diesel. Despite some bickering, she offers to help him get help for his car, but he needs to go with her to her first destination, a place called Rawson Ridge. It’s a plot of land owned by a group of former/present hippies who are bickering when Darby and Joan encounter them on the beach. She asks about “my friend” Ian, and the group claim to barely remember him, as if he was someone who just passed through.

The first night the pair are there, there seems to be all love and light, but Darby finds out otherwise from the daughter of two of the owners. Turns out one of the owners doesn’t want to sell the property, even though the group agreed to it. The next morning, though, Joan finds that person lying on the beach, with evidence that he was strangled to death.

Joan reveals to Darby that she was a nurse manager, which is why she knows the man was strangled. He reveals that he’s a retired police detective. The two of them pair up to make sure people know that the man was murdered, before he’s cremated on a funeral pyre.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Darby And Joan is a similar format to a number of Acorn series, like My Life Is Murder, The Summerdahl Murders, Agatha Raisin and more.

Our Take: Like most of the series we describe above, Darby And Joan works on two levels. One is the “mystery of the week” level, where these two unlikely roadtrippers will encounter mysteries to solve as they drive across Australia. But the other level is the continuing story of just what happened to Joan’s late husband Ian, and the idea that these two seemingly incompatible people are going to become attracted to each other.

The chemistry between Brown and Scacchi, two veterans of the screen who starred in the film Palm Beach three years ago, helps the second level out a lot. There’s an easygoing rapport between the two of them that shows what’s likely a longtime friendship in real life. But that easygoing-ness also shows that, despite their initial bickering, that Darby and Joan have more in common than they even realize, and it makes their quickly-established bond believable.

That’s what’s going to carry the series as the two of them reveal their secrets to each other and themselves. The mysteries they encounter along the way, though, don’t look promising, if the first episode is an indication. Yes, the setup of why Joan is Down Under and how she meets Darby takes up time that would have otherwise been used to develop a proper mystery for the episode, but the murder and “investigation” was perfunctory and simplistic, without a lot of evidence for the audience to grab onto in order to try to solve it themselves.

As the series goes on, and Joan learns more about Ian’s demise, that may not matter as much. But given that the idea is that these two strangers bond over solving mysteries as they find out about each other’s lives, you’d hope the mysteries would be a bit more involved.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: We flash back again to Ian standing in the desert after talking to Joan on the phone. An SUV drives up; he gets in and it drives away.

Sleeper Star: Nudge and Kobe are the two pups that play Diesel, and we’re always happy when Darby’s dog appears on screen. But there are times that Darby and Joan are doing things without him. Where is he? In the RV? We hope the air conditioning is on.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of the people at the hippie camp says that he doesn’t want “Big Death”, i.e. the funeral industry, involved in his friend’s funeral. Not a term we’d use, but OK.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the rudimentary mysteries in each Darby And Joan episode, we loved seeing Brown and Scacchi together, and that might be enough to carry the series.

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.ta