Karaoke meets crime in unique 'Blackpool'
BBC America's ''Viva Blackpool" is a mad genre mash-up. Crime-mystery, musical-comedy, soap opera, they're all layered into this mix, which plays like Tony and Carmela Soprano doing ''Chicago" at a karaoke club while ''The Singing Detective" airs on the bar TV. About a shady entrepreneur named Ripley Holden, his lonely family, and the murder of a punk, this crazy quilt of a TV series is nothing if not unique. It's not entirely successful, but it's an engaging experiment that ought to herald a new era in shower-singing.
The song-and-dance element of ''Viva Blackpool," which premieres tonight at 10, is its most bizarre and distinctive flourish. The show operates like a jukebox, in that the actors periodically burst into songs, accompanied by the original recorded versions. As in most musicals, the characters express themselves operatically, but here with the help of Smokey Robinson (''I Second That Emotion"), Jimmy Cliff (''You Can Get It If You Really Want"), Nancy Sinatra (''These Boots Are Made for Walkin' "), and others. The opening scene finds the moody Ripley (David Morrissey), with his mile-wide sideburns, singing ''Viva Las Vegas" along with Elvis Presley. Mostly we hear Elvis, but behind his voice, there's Morrissey crooning away.
The six-part ''Viva Blackpool" looks like a 1950s jukebox, too. Blackpool is a sort of British Las Vegas, and the show makes it into a spectrum of neon colors against gray skies. The characters have slightly exaggerated, ''Dick Tracy"-like features, right down to the cartoonish faces of the supporting characters, notably Detective Inspector Carlisle (David Tennant), who's bent on bringing Ripley to ruin. They sing and perform loose dance steps through the series like a troupe in early rehearsals for a music video set in a gambling joint -- in this case, Ripley's new venture, the Yankee Dollar.
All the music-video tweaks are what keep the series percolating. They're so odd in the series-TV context, they help you forget the more ordinary and derivative side of the premise, which borrows heavily from ''The Sopranos." Essentially, the rough Ripley and his wife, Natalie (Sarah Parish), have lost their magic. He runs with hookers and hangs at the Yankee Dollar (the show's Bada Bing); she wanders through her cushy days hoping a man will take interest. At last, one man does seduce her -- the very same man fixated on jailing her husband. Is Carlisle smitten with Natalie, or just using her to spy on Ripley?
Meanwhile, like Meadow and Anthony Soprano Jr., the Holdens' two teens are oppressed by their father's outsized character. Shayanne (Georgia Taylor) loses a boyfriend because of Ripley's disapproval, and Danny (Thomas Morrison) is having police troubles of his own.
Morrissey, so excellent in BBC America's ''State of Play," is great to watch here as Ripley, in that he has great antiheroic charisma. He looks like a cross between Liam Neeson and Elvis Presley, a big lug of a guy with a smirk. If his plot lines aren't top-notch, Morrissey's acting is. You can feel Ripley's deep-seated hunger to be a local Donald Trump as it gets sidetracked by legal problems. And Tennant brings a kooky brilliance to his detective, who plies people with pastries as he circles them for information. He's comic as Carlisle verbally wrangles toward the truth. But he's also human enough to undergo romantic temptation by Parish's melancholic Natalie. Like so much of ''Viva Blackpool," he's a whole lot of postmodern whimsy, but with a bit of heart hiding underneath.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. 
