We live in an era of peak prestige television. We watch shows about tortured lawyers, morally grey drug lords, and cutthroat CEOs. We have become exhausted by "serious" anti-heroes (Walter White, Don Draper) who are actually just depressed.
Mortdecai offers the purest form of escapism: the idiotic aristocrat. He is the anti-anti-hero. He doesn’t struggle with his conscience because he doesn’t have one. Reading a Mortdecai novel is like drinking a pint of absinthe while listening to a drunk history professor rant about the fall of the Roman Empire. It is intellectually stimulating, morally depraved, and deeply funny. mortdecai
Furthermore, the Mortdecai IP is ripe for a renaissance. With the success of shows like The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie) and The White Lotus (satirizing the wealthy), a streaming series adaptation of Mortdecai would be perfect. Imagine a 10-episode run on HBO or Netflix: each season adapting one of the three novels, shooting in gritty 1970s locations, casting a stage actor (not a movie star) like Matthew Rhys or Dan Stevens to play the mustachioed menace. A limited series could capture the Bonfiglioli tone—dialogue-driven, cynical, and violently absurd—in a way a 90-minute film never could. We live in an era of peak prestige television
To understand Mortdecai, you must abandon conventional morality. Charlie Mortdecai is a dissolute, roguish art dealer and part-time asset recoverer (which is a fancy way of saying "thief"). He is a member of the British landed gentry who has squandered his inheritance on wine, women, art, and the maintenance of a magnificent handlebar mustache. Mortdecai offers the purest form of escapism: the
Bonfiglioli wrote three Mortdecai novels between 1972 and 1976: Don’t Point That Thing at Me (aka The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery), After You with the Pistol, and Something Nasty in the Woodshed. In these books, Mortdecai narrates his misadventures with a voice dripping in vitriol, high-society snobbery, and existential dread. He is a coward who stumbles into violence, a lecher who loathes everyone equally, and a genius who makes catastrophically stupid decisions.
Unlike the sanitized heroes of modern media, Mortdecai is unabashedly selfish. He hates his dimwitted manservant, Jock (a former wrestler and psychopath), he resents his wealthy wife, Johanna, and he despises the police inspector who tolerates him. Yet, we love him. Why? Because Mortdecai says the quiet part out loud. He is the id of the aristocracy.
| You will love Mortdecai if... | Avoid Mortdecai if... | |-------------------------------|------------------------| | You enjoy PG Wodehouse but wish Bertie Wooster had a gun. | You need a hero with redeeming qualities. | | You like dark, dry, 1970s British cynicism (think The Pink Panther meets Lock, Stock). | You are offended by casual misogyny, racism, or class snobbery (period-appropriate, but real). | | You want short, clever, laugh-out-loud crime novels. | You only know the Johnny Depp film. |