Has anyone here watched the Cadfael television series?

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I just watched one of the DVDs, and I thought it was fantastic. The premise is entirely ridiculous: he’s a medievel monk, and a homicide detective!, but the lead actor, Derek Jacobi, is so thoroughly likeable that it somehow doesn’t seem that absurd. There are a bunch of episodes I haven’t watched yet, but based on what I have seen, I highly recommend it. It’s very enjoyable:

imdb.com/title/tt0108717/

amazon.com/Cadfael-Complete-Collection-Derek-Jacobi/dp/B003YCI1UC
 
Overall the show is well done, but beware that Bro. Cadfael sometimes espouses 20th century mores and values rather than Church teaching, e.g. when he condones euthanasia in “The Rose Rent.”
 
I haven’t watched very many, but I found the shows to be easier than the books. A bit unusual for me. 😉
 
I was going to write exactly what Ad Orientem wrote. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, but sometimes Cadfael comes across as a guy who has time-shifted current popular POVs.
 
I should probably have looked around a bit more online before starting this thread, because for some reason I assumed no one had heard of this show before. Now I’m getting the impression that it has kind of a cult following. But for any CAF members as clueless about television as I am, this seems like a pretty top-notch mystery series, with a cool vibe to it. Anyway, thank you all for the responses!🙂
 
I rented a couple of DVD’S from the library. I sort of lost interest. Not sure if I saw an entire episode. Might have had some distractions.
 
All British TV, from their news to their sitcoms and dramas, is Anti-Catholic.

Their society has the Industrial Revolution and Benthamite Utilitarianism as its core belief system.
 
Dwyer said:
All British TV, from their news to their sitcoms and dramas, is Anti-Catholic.

Their society has the Industrial Revolution and Benthamite Utilitarianism as its core belief system.
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You obviously never saw “Bless Me Father” with the great Irish actor Arthur Lowe. It’s about a Catholic priest in the early 1950s.
Or any of the Roy Clarke comedies like Last of the Summer Wine, Keeping up Appearances, Open all Hours (or it’s current spin-off), Yes Minister, Mr. Bean (which can be shown to children). Only Fools and Horses. How about the original Father Brown series?
If anything, older British TV is ambiguous about the Catholic Church.
The newer stuff I’m not a big fan of. Even John Cleese (who has always been rather anti-Christian) admits the ‘golden age’ of British TV is over.
As for Cadfael, I have to admit I’ve never finished an entire episode.
 
Yeah, really!

I find the same thing with things like NCIS: Los Angeles and the rate things seem to get blown up.

It also seems to be a bit hard to believe that the group fighting ISIS moles and international terror cells and dirty bomb smugglers and mucho intrigue-y stuff are the same group who would investigate whoever drew the naughty bits on the Captain’s photo in the officer’s wardroom. 🤷
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I have read, actually, that real-life cops thought that two of the most realistic cop shows on TV were Adam-12 (for uniform cops) and *Barney Miller *(for detectives).

A girl I knew whose father had been a detective with Toronto Metro said that Barney Miller was true-to-life, especially with regards to the Metro’s night shift (i.e. they all come out at night).

Side note: I have also read that to be a cop in the UK’s police you don’t have to be a Brit, just a citizen of the Commonwealth. That gave me (the germ of) an idea for a British sitcom, called What’s All This Then, which follows a misfit squad of police — a Canadian, an Aussie, an Indian, a Pakistani, a Trinidadian, a Samoan, a Mozambican, a Turkish and a Greek Cypriot, etc — who are all posted to do community policing in the Orkneys or some such. Hilarity ensues.
 
The American sitcom Barney Miller was once described by real police officers in New York as ‘more of a documentary than a sitcom’. The claustrophobic feel of a run-down station house with the holding cell feet away from a detective’s desk was once said to be pretty realistic. And yeah, the petty crooks and nutters they got were closer to the truth than chasing terrorists every week.
 
Midsomer Murders! It’s fun, but they have to keep inventing new towns or they wouldn’t have any people left to murder. 😃

The buildings all seem to be real, not sets. They’ve got some marvelous old architecture in England.
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Back to Cadfael show…I loved the books. The TV series was good. I did HATE one for what they did. THere was a miracle in the book. In the movie they made it a fake miracle. I guess it is one thing to feature monks it was another to admit God could heal. If you have not read the books do so. I reread a lot of them a year or so ago
 
Three of my favorite shows: Cadfael, Midsomer Murders and Barney Miller!
 
John_Lazarus said:
(name removed by moderator);13586776:
It’s a great show and to be honest the premise of most similar shows is pretty absurd if you think about them too hard. Murder She Wrote
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is pretty ludicrous for example at one level but enjoyable at another./QUOTE]

It seemed to be the premise of every episode: Jessica goes to a convention/lecture/movie/party/resort/quilting bee/Russian mob sauna/MMA match/AA meeting/etc — and someone there gets croaked. She could not go anywhere without a murder happening. Like, she’d pop round to Becker’s for a 2L of moo and the grocer is dead with a banana in his eye. 🤷

My friends and I used to call the series “Murder, She Caused”. 👍
Yes in the early years when she stayed in Cabot Cove I use to say that the per capita murder there beat Washington DC or Detroit

But that is true with the mysteries that I read too. Small towns have many murders. With the “Cat who…” series I wondered who would be left in that small town ??miles north of nowhere
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marytk said:
Back to Cadfael show…I loved the books. The TV series was good. I did HATE one for what they did. THere was a miracle in the book. In the movie they made it a fake miracle. I guess it is one thing to feature monks it was another to admit God could heal. If you have not read the books do so. I reread a lot of them a year or so ago
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I remember watching a couple Cadfael episodes on PBS. Interesting that you mention an episode that turned a real miracle into a fake miracle, as I recall one episode, The Holy Thief, that implies that supernatural forces helped to solve the mystery, the characters open a Bible to random pages, a ritual known as the “sortes Biblicae”, and the last verse inspires the murderer to confess.

Maybe there was meant to be some chicanery involved (Cadfael does resort to trickery in other stories to trick pious murderers into confession), but AFAIK the scene was played straight.

As to the TV episode involving a mercy killing, if the reference is to The Rose Rent, this was apparently added to the TV show but is absent from the book version. And even the TV version didn’t really implicate Cadfael himself, he just tells the wife that the medicine can be fatal in high doses. AFAIK, this wasn’t in a “wink and nod” kind of way.

And technically, giving medicine for the primary purpose of easing suffering is acceptable under Catholic medical ethics, even if it hastens death. The show doesn’t reveal if the wife just went home and poured the whole bottle down the husband’s throat (which would be mercy killing), or just had to keep increasing the dose until the dose required to ease suffering caused death.

Interesting to see that so far, no Catholic posters seem scandalized by the many “monk falls in love with lovely maiden and leaves the abbey to marry” side stories, but most of those romances did come from the books, and it is historically accurate that many men back then joined the Church for reasons other than a true vocation.
 
I could never get into this series, not sure why. I’m a fan of Derek Jacobi from his I, Claudius days but perhaps a little less enthusiastic about whodunnit mysteries. I also got the feeling that they took the medieval setting a bit more seriously than say “Hercules the Legendary Journeys” (not that this was set in ‘medieval’ times but you know what I mean) but not all that much more. That the setting was more of a veneer than anything else, as it would have to be for a police procedural-type show.
 
I would get goose-pimples just hearing that discordant blast of trumpets that announced the opening credits and then seeing that snake slither over the mural of Caesar’s face (or whoever’s face it was). I probably still would if I heard it now.

(‘Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud … hatch out.’)

I saw Derek Jacobi perform as Benedick in 'Much Ado About Nothing" with the Royal Shakespeare Theater years ago so as is often the case with British actors he’s classically trained.

I agree that British television aint what it used to be; not sure about American television as I’m kind of out of the loop since I stopped watching Mad Men. I also find myself watching a lot of vintage television however and have been impressed lately by ‘The Outer Limits’ and ‘Thriller’ (hosted by another British actor, Boris Karloff).
 
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