Pod Planet

Pod Planet is scripted comedy fiction that never lets on that it is joking. The humor sits in the gap between a composed narrator and a world that makes very little sense. 'The Mysterious World of Buster Lee' is a mystery series set in the early 1980s, and its cast is crowded with eccentrics. Buster Lee gets around on an Italian scooter, and in the sidecar sits Beck, a blue heeler who sometimes wears goggles against the dust. His mother, Neely Cairo, is an astrologer whose office window looks out on Central Park West. Success has brought her a personal assistant, Mayella Williams, a twenty-year-old psychic who can remote view but still has a long way to go. Joan Reynolds, Buster Lee's landlady in rural New Jersey, is a retired crossword competitor, a former actor, athlete and model, and worked at Bletchley Park during the war. Her niece, Venture Falls, is a thirteen-year-old know-it-all who dreams of being a model, actress and singer. Lars LaGuardia turns up in an oatmeal-colored suit, raised in a diplomatic family and a student of Buddhist philosophy and Kabuki theater as a boy. Then come the cases. In one, a woman named Corliss rattles off suspects in a shooting, from a cousin thrice removed to a tax evader exposed by Pete's software who now works at an organic foods warehouse. She still finds time to ask who would drink milk made of crushed almonds. In another, a poker-playing doctor ends up dead after running up a fortune in debt to the Russian mob, and Chief Scott admits his own gambling ended when his wife, Poodle, stormed out one Monday. 'The Mysterious World of Buster Lee | The Pope' moves the action abroad, from a magic festival in Turkey to questioning by Inspector Domino in Italy about a friend named Ali Aka. That episode opens with the sightings reported at Fatima in 1917, and 'The Mysterious World of Buster Lee | Are We There Yet?' opens on a 1961 suspense novel by one Pizza McCorrell and the claim that Algonquin Park is Canada's number two natural feature, after Niagara Falls. The prose never signals a punchline. After a dog's hour-long game of catch, it simply notes that anyone who wondered what dogs do on their day off now knows. 'Possum Harding Adventures | Let It Snow' uses the same method on the OPEC oil embargo. It opens on a formal address about a national energy crisis, sets Detroit cars at five miles a gallon against Tokyo cars at thirty-three, and calmly concludes that Cuba and the Soviet Union would have to steal the Japanese ones. The Buster Lee credits name Adam Ive as presenter and Oliver Wickham for the theme. Start with 'The Pope' for the mother and son and a case that crosses borders, then try 'Let It Snow' to hear the approach turned on geopolitics.