Endeavour Pack ShotYou have to wonder just how far the senior execs at ITV’s drama department got into the first episode of Sherlock before decided to rip it off. My guess would be not very. It must have been utterly galling, for a network whose dramatic output had thrived on shows about brilliant detectives like Poirot, Marple and Frost to suddenly find themselves soundly beaten at their own game.

And to really rub salt in the wound, not only was Sherlock very, very good, it was also popular, particularly so with the kind of young viewer who wouldn’t dream of settling in on a Sunday night with an episode of Lewis.

To describe Endeavour as a cynical rip off of Sherlock might not be very charitable, but it is accurate. Like Sherlock, the series is about a brilliant detective who is always the smartest guy in the room, and is played by a sort-of-quirkily-attractive chap in his early thirties. He has his partner in crime (solving): Watson for Sherlock, Strange for Endeavour, an older, senior officer who supports him: Lestrade and Thursday, and various people who undermine him. We’re also on first name terms with the pair of them. And, of course, it’s a new take on a classic literary detective.

What’s surprising then is just how good the show is in its own right. Done badly this could have been Morse meets Heartbeat. As it is, it’s a rich and compelling drama led by the well developed and brilliantly performed characters. The 60s setting allows for the disposal of the forensic tropes that strip the drama out of modern-era police procedurals, whilst the writers manage to avoid falling into the dual traps of rose-tinted nostalgia or hand-wringing, apologist social commentary.

Unfortunately, while the writing team have got a lot right, that doesn’t seem to extend to the mysteries themselves. With a running time of 100 minutes per episode we need something that’s not only going to keep audiences guessing for the duration, but that’s also going to come across as feasible. The way Sherlock, and indeed it’s stablemate Jonathan Creek deal with this is to use some sort of technical MacGuffin , which is then supported by a series of ever-more-devious lies and deceptions. They’re as much about revealing how the magic trick is done as about making the criminal confess.

Endeavour goes a much more traditional route, with Morse combining his powers of deduction with a sort of psychological warfare with his suspects. This should lead to tense, dramatic scenes as Morse confronts the killers with the proof of their guilt, but all too often the writers rely on cliché, and it falls flat. This is particularly true of the second episode , ‘Fuge’, which was to be completely frank, rubbish.

That said, even when the show doesn’t get the mystery right, it still nails the relationships between its principal characters, and consequently even ‘Fuge’ was watchable. It’s also hugely enjoyable to see how these events turned the young Endeavour into the Morse that John Thaw made his own.

Given that the pack contains four feature length episodes, two of which are genuinely excellent, the £14 Amazon are charging seems pretty reasonable. The only shame is that it doesn’t include the original pilot episode, which you’ll have to buy separately.  There’s also absolutely no special features, which seems like a real shame given how much work clearly went into making the show.