Private eyes, we’re watching you: A resurgent genre for untrusting times

OK, so Hall & Oates wasn’t actually singing about sleuthing detectives when they warbled “Private eyes, they’re watching you, they see your every move”.

But that ditty feels very of the moment thanks to a resurgence of private investigators on our TV screens.

We are watching them, we are watching their every move, and there are so many to choose from. Is it too much to wonder if an erosion in trust of our institutions has led to this revival of outside operators? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

This week, American TV network NBC commissioned not one but two new shows centred on a private eye, a reboot of The Rockford Files and Sunset P.I., apparently unperturbed by their comparable premises.

The similarities have drawn comparisons to 2006 when the same channel put to air freshmen shows 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, both series set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-esque sketch comedy.

Only one made it past the first season and it wasn’t the one with the word “sunset” in the title.

The producers behind The Rockford Files and Sunset P.I., and presumably even more so the latter, are hoping for a different outcome.

The Rockford Files reboot was a no-brainer. It’s derived from strong intellectual property and even if you’re too young to have seen the 1970s original series fronted by James Garner, it’s still a name you’ve likely heard before.

This new version will star David Boreanaz – the former Buffy star probably has the most consistent resume having sat out only two American TV seasons over the past 30 years, moving from one long-running network to another, from Buffy to Angel to Bones to SEAL Team.

Jim Rockford is an ex-convict who was sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Out on parole, he takes up his former gig as a private investigator as he also tries to rebuild his life. The cops don’t like him, and neither do the local criminal gangs.

The show will also star Jacki Weaver, Michaela McManus and Felix Solis.

Sunset P.I. will feature New Girl’s Jake Johnson as a private investigator in Los Angeles whose life was upended three years ago and he’s still recovering from whatever happened then, but this one is a half-hour comedy.

Not much else has been revealed other than a promise that it will sit within the tradition of Philip Marlowe, the famous private dick of Raymond Chandler’s novels, immortalised as a film noir icon by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. As an aside, Garner played Marlowe in a 1969 movie.

If The Rockford Files and Sunset P.I. were the only shows around, it wouldn’t be notable, but there has been a recent glut of private detective stories on TV.

In part, that could be related to a renewed desire for episodic TV shows that can deliver a case-of-the-week structure in a familiar format while still servicing an overarching, character-driven story arc that pays off at the end of a season.

Last week, Florida-set procedural R.J. Decker dropped on Disney’s Australian platform – it had been rolling out week-to-week on American TV since March but was released in one tranche locally.

Adapted from a Carl Hiaasen book, it stars Scott Speedman as Decker, a former photojournalist out on a parole after 18 months in prison for a crime that he only kind-of committed (sound familiar?).

Now, he uses his camera to catch philandering spouses and other shenanigans as a private detective while getting caught up in a wider conspiracy involving corrupt politicians and businessmen.

Streaming comedy series Man on the Inside features Ted Danson as an amateur investigator who goes undercover at a retirement home and then a liberal arts college.

It’s not all breezy network shows either. The upcoming Spider-Noir series with Nicolas Cage is a superhero meets film noir venture, with Cage playing a grizzled private eye who once spent his time web-swinging around New York City and is now an investigator-for-hire.

Cage called the character 70 percent Bogart and 30 per cent Bugs Bunny, and the high-concept foundation of Spider-Noir make it distinct from the others in tone and ambition.

But like its genre predecessors, the novels of Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, private detective stories surge in a social context in which trust in traditional authority – the police, the business elite and politicians – are on the ebb.

Veronica Mars, which ran from 2004 to 2007 in its original form, with revivals in 2014 and 2019, tapped into that despair and pessimism. Veronica’s world was one in which the cops were incompetent at best, and the rich ruled a segregated community.

So too was the Los Angeles of the 2020 Perry Mason reboot with Matthew Rhys, a prequel in which the character had not yet earnt his legal eagle stripes and was a Depression-era private dick.

A combative dynamic with the authorities is not the mark of every example in the genre – certainly R.J. Decker works with closely with law enforcement, as do a plethora of citizen investigator characters who are more “consultants”, such as Psych’s Shawn Spencer, High Potential’s Morgan Gilroy, Elsbeth’s Elsbeth Tascione, Monk’s Adrian Monk, Castle’s Richard Castle and Elementary’s Sherlock Holmes.

But it does point to this idea that we don’t entirely trust insiders to get the job done, that these crimes need an outsider and a different perspective and experience.

In the US, where many of these series are commissioned, communities have had to contend with difficult debates about policing, and more widely around the world, wealth inequality and political discontent has marked more and more people feeling as if they don’t belong within existing power structures.

As a genre, crime remains a popular one because it allows audiences to experience chaos and then order when the bad guys get their comeuppance, but increasingly, we want those fictional avatars to be one of us.

It’s much easier to be an armchair detective relating to a non-institutional investigator than to be someone embedded in a system that may not serve you.