When I was six years old in 2001, it was a staple family activity to sit down and watch The Inspector Lynley Mysteries on TV. Over 20 years later, adult me was elated to find out the classic crime drama was being rebooted… but it’s nothing like what I expected.
To be clear, that’s a compliment. The new BBC drama Lynley has a life of its own, defining its famed inspector (Leo Suter) through a brand-new lens. There are class wars, rookie mistakes and a frosty partnership with DS Havers (Ted Lasso‘s Sofia Barclay).
Surprisingly, neither of them made an obvious connection between their roles and the existing series. But when I really pressed them on it, there are two other crime dramas they’d like Lynley to crossover with – and one in particular is an absolute doozy.
Lynley stars want their TV detectives to crossover with Blue Lights and Sherlock
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“I’d hop on the Blue Lights bandwagon. I love it,” Suter says about potential crossovers. “My mate Frank Blake is on it and does a wonderful job. They’re up in Belfast. We could do a roadtrip!”
It’s an excellent choice. A newcomer on the crime drama scene, Blue Lights took the nation by storm in the UK, entering its third season in 2025. But for Barclay, keeping things old school is the way forward.
“I would love it if an episode had a Sherlock crossover,” Barclay said. “If Lynley was on a crime scene that then Sherlock interrupts and takes over, and we’re just disgruntled and annoyed… that would be really fun. Let me just have like, angry banter and just disappear after one scene. That would make me happy.”
But perhaps I’m getting too ahead of myself with spinoffs. To me, it’s obvious that Lynley should return for a second season – there’s enough mileage in the format for it to rival shows such as Death in Paradise. This in itself isn’t too different from the original series (which ran until 2008), but from there, the similarities end.
“It’s only in junkets when people ask us when I think about it,” Suter tells me about original series comparisons. “I mean that in a sweet way, because I think Sophia and I both did the same thing in that when we got cast early on, there’s this great source material. We both read the first book and watched the first BBC series, and quickly realized that the scripts that we had in front of us from Steve Thompson were based on different books.
“They had already been filtered through his TV adaptation filter. So we were going to be doing something different and much more modern, in many ways. I was quite calmly able to leave that at the door and then know that we were going to do our own thing. But then you come to the junket, and quite understandably, people ask about it. I do know it exists, but haven’t really thought about it.
“It’s so nice to have a fan base for IP that’s existed for a long time, but I hope people appreciate that we’re going to do something slightly slightly different.”
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