I am – Hercules!!

Only days before Anthony Minghella’s untimely death, HBO ordered 13 hours of “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” about the only female-led private investigation agency solving mysteries in Botswana.

Based on the novel by Alexander McCall Smith, the series’ 2-hour pilot (not part of the 13-episode order) was directed by Minghella (“The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Cold Mountain”) from a screenplay by Minghella and Richard Curtis (“Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” “Love Actually”). It stars Idris Elba, who played Stringer Bell on “The Wire,” and singer Jill Scott.

Here’s “Nev” with our first review:

Anthony Minghella’s final piece of direction is a 1 hour and 45 minute long adaptation of the first of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of books about Precious Ramotswe, founder of the titular ‘The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency’. The books are themselves quite slim volumes but packed full of imagination and colour, evoking the very heart and soul of Africa , the characters and music of a nation filled with history, tradition and intelligence. Minghella and co-screenwriter Richard Curtis have successfully translated this from the page to the screen, and have crafted a beautiful, rich and multicoloured texture, showing a modern Botswana - a country still very much in touch with and influenced by its ancient culture, but also of industry and modernity - a view rarely seen in programmes about Africa, which tend to concentrate on the wildlife, or the politics.

In a perfect piece of casting, the beautiful soul singer Jill Scott plays Precious Ramotswe, a ‘traditionally built’ African woman who has suffered through an abusive marriage and the loss of a child, but has emerged from the experience with a new confidence, a calmness and a strength of purpose. After the death of her father, and against the advice of her father’s slightly dodgy lawyer, she sells his legacy of 100 cows and sets herself up on the outskirts of a small town as Botswana ’s No.1. Ladies Detective Agency. After a slow start during which she employs a secretary, Mme Makutsi – some fine comic relief in the form of Anika Noni Rose (Dreamgirls) – the clients soon start to drift in, and during the course of this first 105 minutes she takes on a cheating husband, a scam artist pretending to be someone’s dead father, and on a slightly darker note, a missing child. There is also time to lay the foundations of a possible romance with the local garage proprietor, JLB Matakoni, nicely played by Lucien Msamati.

All concerned with the show seem to be deeply in love with the project and the setting. The actors and supporting actors are uniformly excellent, and although the script veers perilously close to cloying sentiment at times, it somehow never steps over that line - as you would hope from experienced hands like Minghella and Curtis (and as much an attribute to the source novels, I suspect). The whole endeavour is suffused with an infectious enthusiasm and an attention to detail that is a joy to watch. ‘The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency’ is an exquisite, if bittersweet, final verse in the life of its talented director.

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