TV Review : ‘Dandelion Dead’: A Winning Masterpiece

“Masterpiece Theatre,” which had recently appeared to lose its touch, has happily regained its winning form with the captivating British murder story “Dandelion Dead.”

Redolent of the traditional style and tone that “Masterpiece” addicts will relish, the celebrated 1921 true story of a wife’s murder by her solicitor husband is full of rich atmosphere, ripe characters and black humor.

You think O.J. Simpson is big? This case was huge in British legal history. Set in the cozy town of Hay-on-Wye on the scenic English-Welsh border, and shot there as well, the production should attract anyone who’s ever fantasized about killing a spouse, a business rival or the wretched dandelions encroaching on their front lawn.

Those three harrowing problems and the potential for arsenic to solve all three are what prompt quiet solicitor Herbert Armstrong (the wonderful Michael Kitchen) to affect a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation.

Portraying a proper pillar of the community and father of three children trapped in a loathsome marriage to an unstable, domineering wife (the curdling Sarah Miles), Kitchen deliciously reinvents the classic, henpecked husband.

The key to Kitchen’s underplayed achievement is in his eyes, so full of deference and the quick, limp smiles of a man who’s always a gentleman--even going to the gallows with his spats on.

Writer Michael Chaplin and director Mike Hodges expand beyond a tale of murder. The movie’s real accomplishment is in catching the fabric of a whole town, almost in the manner of a Victorian novel.

This patch of England is emblematic of a country reeling from the loss of a whole generation of young men in the aftermath of World War I. It’s also a postcard picture of deceptive tranquillity--of steam trains, lazy fields and quaint bridges, of mirthful Christmas dinners, brotherly Masonic Lodge rituals and family gatherings around the photo album and piano.

Meanwhile, those cursed dandelions fester like weeds.

* “Dandelion Dead” airs this Sunday and the following Sunday in 90-minute installments, at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, and at 8 p.m. on KVCR-TV Channel 24. It also airs Tuesday at 8 p.m. on KOCE-TV Channel 50.