I really want to like the series Down Cemetery Road on Apple TV. I really do.

The series was based on a novel by Mick Herron, who wrote the Slow Horses series of books. I enjoyed those books and enjoyed the very watchable television series that was adapted from the books. The got Emma Thompson to play the role of the dogged private detective Zoe Boehm. I just love Emma Thompson. And they got Ruth Wilson to play the role of Sarah Tucker, a woman swept up in the convoluted intrigue surrounding a murder. Wilson was pretty great in Luther with Idris Elba.

Sounds like a pretty good start, right? But the way they have executed the show so far has turned it into a muddled mess. In the opening scenes, Sarah Tucker’s banker husband, Mark, invites Gerard, a potential investor, to a dinner party at their house. Every word Mark speaks to Gerard is so insincerely servile that I refused to believe it when Gerard backed out of the deal. Mark would have done literally anything for that guy. Illegal, immoral, anything. Why would Gerard walk away from that?

(While they’re having dinner, the house next door blows up, shattering their windows and showering them in glass. Nobody is injured in any way. Not a scratch on them. This didn’t really count for much in the rest of the muddled mess. It’s a small error but I hate inconsistencies like that with the white-hot intensity of a thousand blazing suns.)

Zoe Boehm spends most of the first episode being a complete dick to everyone around her, not least of all her husband, who is quirky but, I thought, undeserving of her rage. She’s still pretty much a jerk in the next two episodes (I’ve seen just three at this point), which makes it hard to root for her as she tries to find out who killed her husband. And she’s a shit detective, finding clues to the crime mostly by accident.

There is a series of recurring interludes between C, a head of government, and Hamza, one of his underlings, which go so far over the top past quirky into farce that they knock me right out of the show every time. C repeatedly threatens Hamza with every punishment he can think of up to and including death in a level, malevolent tone that more than suggests he’s not kidding at all. Hamza chuckles and bats his eyes at C’s tongue-lashings as if they are merely having a lover’s spat. And as it turns out, they are! Hamza grovels like a simpering toady, C lets him make more mistakes, and they have another spat. Kind of undercuts the whole “evil government overlord” vibe C’s trying for.

So far Ruth Wilson has the best part in this show and she’s pretty good in it but for the past three episodes she hasn’t gotten to do much. She was barely in the third episode at all.

Five more episodes of this. I want to hang on to the end but I don’t know if I’m going to make it.