By Steve Eramo - The Morton Report

Classic cars, real English ale, opera and cryptic crossword puzzles — probably not the interests of your typical police officer, but whoever said that Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse was typical? Created by writer Colin Dexter, this often sullen-tempered but still likeable and always dependable police officer was the bane of existence of many a criminal in the city of Oxford, England.

For several years, TV audiences watched the DCI solve cases and put lawbreakers behind bars in the successful ITV crime drama Inspector Morse. In 2011, the network aired the prequel Endeavour, which followed a much younger Morse (then a Detective Constable) during his university days and early police career. When it came to casting the show’s lead role, its producers set their sights on Liverpool-born actor Shaun Evans, who was both surprised and flattered to be singled out.

“I was actually out of town when my agent called me and asked how I felt about playing a young Morse,” recalls Evans. “I told him that it was difficult to say having not seen a script. Also, when you go out for a job, you’re generally one of several people on a list. So I said, ‘Look, I’m away at the moment, but if they [the show’s producer] are serious, I’ll come back and we can organize it.’ That’s when he told me, ‘Well, there is no list and it’s not an open casting call. It’s more or less an offer that has come out of the blue. They’ve essentially sought you out and want to see only you.’

“I knew very little about the Morse character, so I bought all the books and read them before I got back home. That’s when my interest was piqued. I thought, ‘My God, not only is this a fantastic character in his mid-to-late 50s, but how interesting would it be to get him from his mid-to-late 20s to the person that he is in the books.’ In the books, Morse has a bit of an alcohol problem, he’s not great socially, and he ends up dying on his own without ever being married or becoming a father. How fascinating would it be if we could capture a little of what makes him that way.

“So I came back to the UK, read the Endeavour script, and then we all got together. During that first meeting I laid all my cards on the table. I explained that I wasn’t proposing to do a facsimile of what had gone before. If we were going to do this, we needed to create something new. When you say that, it’s getting you off the hook then as well, because you don’t arrive on set the first day with people expecting something that they aren’t going to get. By the same token, I’m not going to be on set or at my place of work and feeling uncomfortable just trying to copy something else. Everyone seemed to be on the same page about it, and then we moved forward. It was really as simple and seamless as that, to be honest with you, so I was very, very fortunate.”

Having quit his Oxford college prior to earning a degree, the young Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans) spent a short time as a cipher clerk in the Royal Corps of Signals before joining the police in 1965. He soon becomes disenchanted with law enforcement and decides to resign, but before he can do so, Morse is sent along with other detectives to assist the Oxford City Police on a case involving a missing 15-year-old girl. His new superior officer, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, sees the potential in Morse and takes him under his wing.

With the late veteran actor John Thaw having left an indelible mark in TV history as the star of Inspector Morse, it was now up to Evans to take the role and put his own unique spin on it in the Endeavour pilot.

“Because it’s the nature of creating a character and telling a story, each and every time you play a new part, it comes with its own set of very unique challenges and amazing joys as well,” says the actor. “This [acting] is such a great job and it’s a real privilege each time you’re given the opportunity to play a new role. Each character is different and you have to find a way to make it your own.

“That was especially true for me with Endeavour because John Thaw had played him before me. I’ve had the good fortune, though, of working fairly regularly over the past ten years, and during that time, I’ve been able to play my own versions of characters. That [creative] process isn’t always clearly definable, meaning what you do could be a physical thing and other times just a feeling or instinct. No matter what, though, it all helps to, again, make that character as unique as possible.”

Thinking back to the Endeavour pilot, is there anything about its filming that sticks out in the actor’s mind?

“It’s funny, what you see onscreen is two hours of story that, in fact, we’ve spent five or six weeks shooting,” he explains. “There’s so much that goes on, and whenever you’re filming, you end up locked in a very specific head space, or at least that’s what I always find. So it’s kind of hard to remember certain things, because all of sudden you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re all done,’ and then you pick back up the pieces of your own life and move on, do you know what I mean?

“I can tell you that it was wonderful to work with Roger Allam [DI Thursday]. Also, one of the highlights was and is the type of guest actors we have coming onto the show. They’re just fantastic, and that’s one of the real benefits of working on a TV series like Endeavour. With each new episode, the producers bring in actors who are at the top of their game and who each bring something new to the table in terms of helping tell these stories.”

Following the success of the Endeavour pilot, ITV commissioned a first season of four brand new episodes, the first of which began airing in the States two weeks ago (Sunday, July 7) on PBS’s MASTERPIECE Mystery! In the season opener, "Girl," Thursday and Morse investigate the death of a secretarial student and the subsequent shooting of a doctor. Despite a keen observational eye and relentless pursuit of what he believes is the right investigative path, the road ahead proves a rocky one for our hero. Some of this professional strife can be chalked up to the arrival of Oxford City Police station’s new commanding officer, Chief Superintendent Reginald Bright (Anton Lesser). Even with Thursday in his corner, Morse has a tough go of it with Bright.

“In terms of our story, or any story, really, in order for there to be something compelling to watch and for the plot to advance, each of the characters has to come with conflict,” says Evans. “So what we essentially have with the character of Bright is someone who wants things done in a very particular fashion, and whilst he can admire or at least acknowledge the positives that Endeavour brings to the job, that certain way of thinking how the police force should move forward is first and foremost in his mind.

“Now, that’s not to say that Bright and Endeavour are enemies. Again, like I said, for things to be interesting, there needs to be conflict on every level. Internally, you need conflict when trying to find out who killed this person this week, and there also needs to be something that stops Morse from moving forward. Let’s face it, if after this first case, which is a huge success, he then comes in and immediately everything is rosy in the garden, then it’s going to get boring, right? So I think the relationship with Bright and Morse is an important one, and Anton Lesser, who is a fantastic actor, has created someone very real and very alive with his performance as Bright,” praises the actor.

“When it comes to Thursday, it would be quite easy to say that his and Morse’s relationship is much like that of a father and son, but I don’t necessarily feel it is. I think Thursday represents an older generation and in some respects a dying way in which the police operated at the start and middle of the 1960’s, before we had computers, cell phones, texts and so forth. Morse, on the other hand, sort of represents a new way forward that we should think about.

“So on one level they very much represent both those sides, but relationship-wise, Thursday is definitely someone who my character looks up to and is influenced by. However, one of the beauties of Endeavour is that he’s very much his own man, and whilst there is a hierarchy in the police force that has to be bowed down to, I feel like my character truly believes that it’s still worth the risk, even if it means alienating those closest to him, to come up with the goods, and not for anyone else’s benefit, but for his own.”

In the aforementioned "Girl," Morse manages to crack the case, but not without making the mistake of dismissing a key suspect. This is the final straw for Bright, and it falls to Thursday to assign the young man to general duties, at least until he takes the sergeants’ exam. While he is a brilliant detective, he is not yet seen by some to be a good police officer. Morse forges on, though, and as the character surmounts each new hurdle, he grows and develops that much more.

“With these four episodes, we need to get Morse from ‘A’ to ‘B,’ and the ‘B’ that we need to get him to is closer to where it begins in the books,” notes Evans. “There are a few specific things story-wise that, I think, the seeds of which need to be sown. The sooner we do that, the more fascinating and darker the character becomes and, in my opinion, even more interesting to watch.

“In season one of Endeavour, you can see Morse moving forward and witness the various life challenges or life beats that he’s experiencing. Oftentimes that’s kind of separate from the specific case that he and the other detectives are working on, but still important, as are the character’s interpersonal relationships. By the end of the first season, we definitely find out more about who Morse is, and in the season finale ["Home"], he goes though another major sort of life beat. Where we end that story with him is a place of like, ‘Oh, crap, now what?'" teases the actor with a chuckle.

It was back in 2002 that Evans first grabbed the attention of TV viewers playing gay French teacher John Paul Keating in season two of the comedy/drama Teachers. His other small screen credits include the made-for-TV movies The Project and Come Rain Come Shine along with the miniseries The Virgin Queen as well as guest spots in such shows as Murder City, Inspector George Gently, Ashes to Ashes and Whitechapel.

The actor also played recurring roles in The Take, Silk and The Last Weekend. His feature film work includes The Boys & Girl from County Clare, Being Julia, Sparkle, Dread and Telstar: The Joe Meek Story. He may consider himself a bit of latecomer to the acting business, but Evans has not wasted a second of any time spent honing his craft.

“I didn’t really start working as an actor until I was in my early 20s, but I always felt that this was the career I was going to move towards,” he says. “I’m not sure why, though, because there’s no experience of it in my family. However, it’s like many things in that doors can open for you and it then shows that you’re kind of on the right path to some degree. I went to drama school here [London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama], and when I left I just began working. I’ve since had the amazing good fortune to play a wide range of roles and tell lots of different stories in a variety of mediums.

“So it’s been a good progression, and, at least for me, what makes this job rewarding is the people that I get to interact with. These are people who have common interests, are more often than not at the top of their game, have something to offer and are willing to ask themselves sometimes difficult questions. I’ve always believed that, even from one of the very first jobs that I had. I thought, ‘God, these people are incredible.’ Aside from the actual work, it makes you want to be sort of the best that you can be.”

Endeavour fans can look forward to seeing more of the actor’s work as the young Morse when the series returns for a second season. What are his hopes for the show going into a second year?

“There’s never a guarantee that you’ll make more of something, you know, so at the end of Endeavour’s first season it was like, ‘Okay, we’ve had a really good run here, thanks for that. I hope it goes down well with audiences,’” says the actor. “When you’re then given the opportunity to make four more episodes or take the show further, I think you have to ask a little more of yourself.

“With hindsight and with the lessons you’ve hopefully learnt, you have to tell even better stories and tell them in an even better way. What’s the point of having done it if you haven’t learnt anything about what you feel might have been better played in terms of story, performance, etc?

“I think each of these episodes builds on the prior one, and each story has its own specific style because we have fantastic directors, each of them with a very individual and slightly competitive edge. So that lends itself to trying to make the next episode better than the last one, which is great for the show, and, of course, the viewer.”

​By Tirdad Derakhshani, Inquirer Staff Writer, Philly.com

​He prefers to keep company with Mozart  , Wagner, and Debussy rather than go out with the lads for a brew.

One thing the young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse most assuredly is not is a lad. Or a dude.

Awkward, socially inept Morse is the brilliant detective featured in the PBS Masterpiece Mystery entry Endeavour, a finely crafted TV series set in the ancient university town of Oxford in the mid-1960s.

The first season, which consists of four feature-length mysteries, premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday and runs on consecutive Sundays through July 28 on WHYY TV12.

Endeavour was commissioned by the ITV network after a one-off TV movie of the same title aired in 2011 to critical and popular acclaim.

Liverpudlian actor Shaun Evans, who reprises his role as Endeavour Morse, said he was pleasantly shocked that ITV picked up the show.

"I never thought it would go any further," Evans said on the phone from London. "Then I got the call that they wanted to make four more." Evans, 33, an impressive, deeply intuitive actor who has made Endeavour Morse very much his own, said a second season already had been green-lighted for next year.

The reason for Endeavour's success isn't hard to divine. It's written with meticulous care, insight, and eye for detail, and it features some of the best British actors, including Roger Allam and Anton Lesser.

But it's Endeavour's provenance makes it all the more fascinating: It's the second spinoff of one of the most beloved TV mysteries from the 1990s, Inspector Morse, which featured the inimitable John Thaw as the title character and Kevin Whately as his oft-mistreated bagman, Sergeant Robert Lewis.

Adapted from the novels by mystery writer Colin Dexter, Inspector Morse ran for 33 feature-length episodes from 1987 to 2000, ending with Morse's death from a heart attack. (Thaw, who was gravely ill during filming of the last season, died 15 months later of cancer.)

A first spinoff, Inspector Lewis, premiered in 2006 and stars Whately as Morse's replacement.

Endeavour is unique because it promises to clarify one of the greatest mysteries of the Morse character: his youth.

Morse already is in his 50s when we meet him in the Dexter novels and the show. An emotionally closed-off introvert, he reveals little about his past. He tells no one his Christian name - his lover doesn't know it, nor does his partner Lewis - until he's on his deathbed!

We know Morse was a middle-class kid from a broken home who won a scholarship to study classics and literature at Oxford. (His major is identified as "Greats.") More than capable, he nonetheless fails to complete his degree, joining the Oxford police force instead.

The middle-aged Morse lives alone and would rather bury himself in the London Times crossword puzzle than ask a woman out on a date. He is afraid of women and prone to hide his anxiety by being patronizing, even caustic.

"He's someone who seems frozen in the past," Evans said of the older Morse, "and he doesn't get people."

With few clues to go on, Evans had a hard job of reverse-engineering the character.

"What are the factors in his late 20s that would make him a heavy drinker and kind of terrible with women, yet so great at his job?" Evans says he asked himself. "Who is this person who finds solace in art and opera . . . rather than other people?"

Evans closely studied the Dexter novels, but he avoided watching Thaw's series. "I don't see the benefit of doing a facsimile of what another actor was doing. . . . I mean I could only do a [terrible] version of Thaw! And it would shortchange the audience," he said. "I thought the only way to make it good was to make it my own."

Endeavour introduces viewers to two characters later to figure large in Morse's life: pathologist Max DeBryn (James Bradshaw) and a young, naive constable named Jim Strange (Sean Rigby), who will be Morse's superior 25 years down the road.

The most important character, however, is young Morse's boss, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, played by eminent stage actor Roger Allam. Thursday is Endeavour's mentor and spiritual adviser. Allam, currently on stage as Prospero in The Tempest at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, said Thursday is the positive, encouraging father Endeavour never had.

"I think Thursday is shrewd enough to see something in young Endeavour that is very often lacking in a police station," Allam, 59, said in a phone chat. "The police often get bogged down in procedure, and what Endeavour brings is this more imaginative, instinctive way to deal with crimes."

It's an especially good talent to have in Dexter's Oxford, where the killers are, more often than not, brilliant Oxford professors who like to baffle the cops with cryptic clues, unbreakable codes, wordplay, and obscure literary allusions.

That's when Endeavour puts on his supersleuth cape.

By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic

Having last year put a toe in the water with an exploratory pilot and found it fine, "Endeavour" returns to the PBS series "Masterpiece Mystery" Sunday with four new episodes. They are excellent company, even if they sometimes feel too coincidental, complicated, clever or corpse-strewn to be true.

The series is a prequel to the beloved "Inspector Morse" (1987-2000), which starred the late John Thaw as an Oxford-based police detective. (The character's first name provides the new show's title.) While Kevin Whately, who played his old number two, mans the ongoing timeline in the sequel "Inspector Lewis," "Endeavour" jumps back to the mid-'60s, when the future chief inspector was yet a mere detective constable; it keeps the character alive at the same time it feeds our not wholly exhausted taste for midcentury period drama.

As in the pilot, the backbone of the series is the relationship between young Morse (Shaun Evans) and his immediate superior, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday, wonderfully played by Roger Allam, whose manner, shape and dark-stout voice (the series' pedal tone, to venture a musical metaphor) recall Michael Gambon in both "The Singing Detective" and "Maigret." And like Maigret, he has a pipe.

We get to know Thursday better this year: In one lovely scene, Morse sits down with the family at breakfast, which makes him a little uncomfortable and a little happy; we know that his own life will never look like this.

Like a milder, slightly more flexible version of his irascible later self, Morse is socially awkward and sometimes abrasive — "a bloody misfit," someone calls him. Fortunately, the character exists in a time when no one diagnoses him as "a little autistic."

He is already addicted to puzzles and opera and displaying a signature weakness for distressed damsels: "When it comes to a bird with a wing down," observes Thursday, "you've got a blind spot a mile wide." But he is also chivalrous (or shy): When one mixed-up young woman implores him, "Take me to bed," he reads her to sleep with poetry instead. (He is literary as well as musical.)

Morse knows that he's the smartest young buck in the herd, which naturally irritates his co-workers, of whom Det. Sgt. Peter Jakes (Jack Laskey) is his most immediate and vocal rival. At the same time, there is a moment in each film where he smacks his forehead and calls himself an idiot, having missed some crucial clue that has been staring him in the face all along.

Russell Lewis, who also developed "Inspector Lewis," wrote all four episodes, though different directors bring different quirks to the material. Some get a little too fancy with the framing and focus, and the staging of certain Tense Moments relied more on movie convention than the show's own aesthetic logic. (They struck me as funny in a way I am sure was not intended.) The unfussy approach that worked for "Morse" also works best for "Endeavour." Still, if there is more action than in the parent series, "more" in this case does not mean "much," and things stay mostly slow, quiet and a little mournful. Evans does not attempt a John Thaw imitation, but he sits deep in the part.

The new season adds Anton Lesser as a flinty new boss for both Thursday and Morse, who warns the station house against "breaches of procedure or Spanish practices" (a now-controversial term for workplace customs that cut labor a break); he bumps Morse back from the head of the class, to which Thursday has skipped him. Also new is Sean Rigby as friendly Police Constable Strange, who will have made chief superintendent by the time of "Inspector Morse."

By MIKE HALE - The New York Times

In PBS’s ‘Endeavour,’ the Detective Is a Poetry Lover

As “Endeavour” begins Sunday night on PBS’s “Masterpiece Mystery!,” we first glimpse the young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse singing in a choir. Those with the Morse bug, or the British mystery bug in general, will remember that the first episode of “Inspector Morse” back in 1987 began with the middle-aged detective inspector’s rushing from a crime scene to a choir rehearsal. Mission accomplished.

Having started last year with a single episode, the prequel series “Endeavour” is now starting fresh with a four-episode first season. Given another opportunity to wallow, tastefully, in nostalgia for its predecessor, the new show doesn’t miss a beat. A substantial audience — more than seven million viewers in Britain — is happy with that, and “Endeavour” has already been renewed for a second season.

Other viewers — those who watch mysteries for the mystery — may lose patience as the episode’s overly complicated plot, involving a dead secretary, a doctor murdered in a public restroom, a series of post office robberies and a love child, is resolved haphazardly and implausibly.

So if you’re looking for a solid British detective yarn, check out “DCI Banks” (Season 1 is in reruns on PBS stations, including Channel 13 in New York) or wait for “Case Histories” to return. “Endeavour” offers a different and not negligible set of pleasures: it’s like a table perfectly set for afternoon tea, cress sandwiches here, clotted cream there. Sit for 90 minutes, have a cup of orange pekoe and feel satisfied.

Having just joined the Oxford police, Morse immediately makes enemies when the astute inspector Fred Thursday (Roger Allam) chooses him as bagman, a position that should have gone to a sergeant. The references to bagman, meaning chief assistant, are part of a self-conscious effort to use language to remind us that the action is set in the early 1960s: A constable discovers a French letter (condom), and Morse remarks on a vicar’s interest in cruciverbalism (crossword puzzles).

The tastes for puzzles, opera, poetry and flashy cars that the novelist Colin Dexter originally gave Morse have become an orthodoxy after nearly 40 years of books and television shows, and they’re reverently invoked here. Morse reads a troubled suspect to sleep with Tennyson’s poem “Lady of Shalott,” best known for giving Agatha Christie the title for “The Mirror Crack’d.” A larcenous character is referred to as la gazza ladra, Rossini’s thieving magpie. Morse’s red Jaguar Mark 2 is in the future, but he gets to drive the police force’s black Mark 1’s.

The lead actors do good work, even though their job, to some extent, is to make themselves part of the period décor. Shaun Evans makes Morse appealing, despite his twitchy pride, and Sean Rigby brings a vulpine grace to Constable Strange, Morse’s current subordinate and future boss. Best is Mr. Allam (the original Javert in the London production of “Les Misérables”) as the heroically reserved Thursday, alternately flashing his affection for, and exasperation with, Morse.

In the course of Sunday’s episode Morse develops one of his patented hopeless crushes on a suspect, and it gets him busted down from bagman to general duty. You’re a good detective but a poor policeman, Thursday tells him, and something similar could be said of “Endeavour”: it’s a poor mystery, but it’s not a bad meal.