Jack Taylor

There were three seasons of three episodes each of this Irish TV series. They were based on characters created by Ken Bruen, a fairly prolific author, who wrote twelve Jack Taylor novels, with another set to be published in November, 2017. Many of the episodes are taken right from the books. Taylor is a train wreck of a man, a former member of the Garda Síochána, the national police force of the Republic of Ireland. He was sacked for assaulting a politician he pulled over for speeding, and now takes on cases privately, when he’s sober enough to handle it. Which is not all that often. The stories are set in Galway, which I like. It’s nice to see British movies that aren’t set in London, and Irish ones not set in Dublin. Or French ones not set in Paris or Marseilles, and Danish ones not set in Copenhagen. We’ve seen examples of all those things recently, and liked them a lot.

I felt that it got off to a good start and maintained it for a while, but eventually the plots began to seem more and more farfetched. Never totally awful, and I don’t regret seeing them all, but it was surely time to put the thing to bed. At least, I don’t see anything about plans for a fourth series.

The star is Iain Glen, who you will recognize as Ser Jorah Mormont, one of the earliest supporters of Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons …if you’re a Game of Thrones fan, like we are. He is very good. He is ably supported by Nora-Jane Noone, who we first encountered in her very first film, The Magdalene Sisters. This is a horror story perpetrated by the Catholic Church that is fully as bad, and maybe even worse, than baby-raping priests. Look it up. They operated in their full awfulness until 1996. The irony is that one of the Jack Taylor episodes deals with the aftermath of these moral sinkholes, and what they did to the poor women sentenced to live in these prisons.