The new Dalziel and Pascoe has been sold on a single twist. Two women now hold the titles that Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan carried for the BBC, and almost every announcement of the ITV and BritBox reboot led with the swap, filed under the “gender-flipped” label. It is the easiest part of the project to write about, and the least important.

The harder test is what the reboot does with Reginald Hill. His Yorkshire novels were stranger, slyer and more willing to let a killer walk than the BBC series that made his detectives famous. British television is currently rebuilding its old detective brands one by one, and a parody of the whole formula is already on the way from the creator of Black Mirror. In that climate, putting two women in the car is a cosmetic change. Going back to the books would be a radical one.

That matters beyond one ITV slot. Viewers on both sides of the Atlantic are being asked to spend their evenings, and often a subscription, on detectives they already know, and to treat a recast as reinvention. If the reboot only changes the faces, the audience is buying the same box set twice.

What the Dalziel and Pascoe reboot actually is

The facts are plain. Kerry Godliman, known from Taskmaster, After Life and Whitstable Pearl, plays the seasoned Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel. Nina Singh, from Virdee and Art Detectives, plays Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, described in the official synopsis as a “newly qualified, by the book perfectionist”. The six-part series was co-created by the Vera writer Colette Kane and Daisy Martey, is directed by Isher Sahota and produced by Juliet Charlesworth, whose credits include Happy Valley, for West Road Pictures. According to the casting coverage carried by Yours and AOL, it will air on ITV and STV and stream on ITVX; Good Housekeeping’s list of upcoming detective dramas puts its arrival on ITVX in 2027.

Godliman’s own description of her character, quoted in that coverage, is the most useful clue so far: “accomplished at her job, warm, but also direct to the point of being abrasive. Weary and warm hearted.” Singh, for her part, said the writers had “incorporated humour so well into the scripts at the same time as keeping you constantly guessing what’ll happen next”. That is a pitch for a warm, funny, mismatched-partners procedural. It is also, word for word, a pitch that could describe half the crime dramas on British television.

A revival wave built on familiar names

Dalziel and Pascoe does not arrive alone. Bergerac returned on UKTV with Damien Molony in the role John Nettles made famous, and has since been renewed for a second and a third series. Lynley, a new version of the Inspector Lynley novels by Elizabeth George, premiered on BritBox in the United States months before BBC One showed it at home. Maigret, recast with Benjamin Wainwright and moved to present-day Paris, launched on PBS Masterpiece in America and reaches British viewers on U&Drama only this December. The American site Tellyvisions, reporting BritBox’s deal for Dalziel and Pascoe, put it bluntly: the decade is “rife with British remakes, reboots, and reimaginings of series from the late 20th century.”

The revivals also wear their nostalgia openly. The new Lynley puts its hero back behind the wheel of a vintage Jensen Interceptor, the same model as the earlier series. The Arts Desk’s review of the new Bergerac noted that the detective’s famous Triumph Roadster “rides again”. These are not adaptations that want you to forget the old version. They want you to remember it, and to subscribe.

None of that is a crime. But it shapes what gets made. A known title is a pre-sold title, and a co-production partner selling British mysteries to North American subscribers has every reason to prefer a name those subscribers already recognise. The gender swap gives that familiar name a fresh headline, which is exactly why it was the headline.

The formula is now a joke, twice over

The clearest sign that the British detective drama has hardened into a formula is that it is about to be mocked on a global platform. Netflix describes Charlie Brooker’s Blackmere, due in early 2027, as “an absurd comedy disguised as an incredibly serious crime thriller”, in which a tormented detective leaves “the rain-soaked Northern city of Bleakford” to catch a ritualistic killer. The official logline ends with a warning: “Contains blood and frowning.” What’s on Netflix calls it a “blood-soaked spoof of the gritty British crime thriller genre”, starring Paddy Considine, Georgina Campbell, Lena Headey and Rory Kinnear.

Brooker has done this before. A Touch of Cloth, which he wrote with Daniel Maier for Sky One, parodied British police procedurals more than a decade ago; its title was a play on A Touch of Frost. Maier is back in the Blackmere writers’ room, alongside Emer Kenny, a writer on the real detective drama Karen Pirie. When the same joke can be told about the same genre twice, years apart, the genre has not moved much in between.

Critics have noticed the same thing in the reboots themselves. Reviewing Lynley for The Irish News, Billy Foley wrote that “the setup is from page one of the TV producers’ manual”, with detectives who are “polar opposites and unconventional”. His headline called it crime drama “for viewers stuck in the 1980s”. A toff inspector and a mouthy working-class sergeant, a seasoned cynic and a by-the-book rookie: the mismatched pair is the genre’s factory setting, whatever the actors’ genders.

The best case for the reboot

The defenders of the revival wave have a serious argument, and it deserves to be stated at full strength. Adaptation is not recycling. Simenon has been adapted for television again and again, and nobody accuses a new Maigret of laziness; every generation gets its own Sherlock Holmes. Hill wrote more than twenty Dalziel and Pascoe novels, and the BBC series ran its own continuity, writing out characters the books kept. There is unadapted material here. The Arts Desk made the timing point neatly about Bergerac: the original stopped in the early nineties, “so you can hardly complain that this reboot is premature.” Audiences seem to agree, since UKTV has kept ordering more. And casting two women is not a gimmick in a genre that has spent decades pairing a gruff older man with a younger one. An abrasive, weary woman running a Yorkshire murder squad will be read differently by viewers, colleagues and suspects, and that difference can generate drama the old pairing never could.

All of that is true, and it still misses the point. A new cast is the minimum a reboot owes its audience, not the maximum. Lynley also recast its sergeant and leaned into class tension, and its critics still found the familiar manual underneath. The question is not whether the detectives look different. It is whether the story is allowed to behave differently.

What Reginald Hill offers that television ignored

Here the reboot has an unusual advantage, because its source was never as safe as its first adaptation. Hill, who died in 2012 and was inducted into the Detection Club in 1978, built his novels with structural tricks: chapters out of chronological order, sections presented as a novel written by Pascoe’s wife, Ellie. His detectives do not always get their man. At least one book ends with the villain escaping, and another implies that a run of accidents Dalziel and Pascoe dismiss included at least one undetected murder. One novella sends a retired Dalziel and Pascoe, by then a European police commissioner, to investigate the first murder on the moon. Television, then and now, prefers the case closed by the final scene.

There is also a history lesson in the casting. ITV tried Dalziel and Pascoe once before, in 1993, with the comedy double act Hale and Pace in a three-part adaptation of A Pinch of Snuff. Hill was unhappy with it and it stayed a one-off. ITV now returns with another comic performer, Godliman, in the lead. That is not a reason for alarm; Godliman has done serious work on Trigger Point. It is a reminder that the books’ comedy was always laced with something darker, and that the light touch is the easy part to get right.

The new Dalziel and Pascoe will earn its title if it is stranger than the 1996 version, not merely if it is female. Let a case end badly. Let the structure bend. Let the abrasive inspector be genuinely difficult rather than lovably grumpy. If Charlie Brooker can get a full series out of mocking the formula, the least the genre can do is try breaking it.

Confirmed so far, and what is still open

Confirmed: ITV and BritBox are co-producing a six-episode Dalziel and Pascoe with Kerry Godliman as DI Andrea Dalziel and Nina Singh as DS Paige Pascoe, co-created by Colette Kane and Daisy Martey, filmed in the north of England from spring 2026 and listed by Good Housekeeping for ITVX in 2027. Bergerac, Lynley and Maigret have all returned with new casts, and Netflix has set Blackmere for early 2027. Still open: how faithful the scripts are to Hill’s plots, whether each novel becomes a single episode or a longer story, a question Tellyvisions raised that the publicity has not settled, and the exact broadcast date. Everything said here about tone comes from the cast’s own words and the official synopsis; nobody outside the production has seen an episode.

Tags: Charlie Brooker, Kerry Godliman, Dalziel and Pascoe, detective dramas, Nina Singh, Reginald Hill