TV Review: Il commissario Montalbano (1999-2021)

Il commissario Montalbano (1999-2021) directed by Alberto Sironi based on the novels by Andrea Camilleri

Inspector Salvo Montalbano (Luca Zingaretti) is the head of police in Vigata, a fictional town on Sicily. His life would seem to be idyllic with his seaside home where he goes for a swim every morning. But people being people, plenty of crimes occur even in an idyllic seaside town. His station has a lot of other officers who help him investigate, from the lowly (and comic relief) Catarella (Angelo Russo), who answers the phones and does computer work (a rarer skill in the early 2000s) to Augello (Cesare Bocci) and Fazio (Peppino Mazzotta), the main subordinates who do a lot of the leg work. Montalbano occasionally deals with his supervisor, a police chief with political ambitions from a nearby town. The cast also includes Montalbano's long-distance girlfriend Livia (Katharina Bohm) who comes to visit often and is just as often put off by Montalbano because of his duties. So she's long-distance and long-suffering. An assortment of other characters recur, like his cook and some other friends.

The police work is more like a cozy mystery, with a lot of interviews and figuring out what happened based on evidence and testimony. Each show has some action sequences, typically a group of officers searching a building or area for a suspect or a vital clue. Sometimes there is a car chase, though Italian driving being what it is, a lot of the times I was nervous watching how aggressively they drove in the tight streets of the town even when they weren't chasing someone. They mysteries are satisfying, usually having two or three different crimes that tie together by the end of the episode.

The first ten episodes represent the first four seasons of the show (from 1999 to 2002). The episodes range from an hour and a half to two hours, so basically each one is a feature-length movie. The entire series is 37 episodes spanning over twenty years, with most years having two or four episodes and some years skipped. I've enjoyed them immensely (the one where he adopts a dog who was the seeing-eye dog of a murdered blind man was my favorite) and will keep watching.

The show would probably be rated TV-MA in America, because a lot of topless women show up, sometimes in sexual situations that are brief but striking. They have appeared in almost every episode I have watched so far. Is all Italian TV like that? The characters use salty language sometimes too. The violence is fairly minimal, like on Columbo or Murder, She Wrote. It's there but it is not particularly gory and is usually off-screen.

Recommended--highly for adults.

This series is available streaming on Kanopy, available from local libraries.