It’s entirely possible that the first season of ‘Lolita Lobosco’ passed you by. It’s a charming Italian crime drama, set in Bari at the tip of the Italian southern coastline. It’s a beautiful location and looks spectacular on screen.
If you want to avoid all spoilers, stop reading this article now.
Season 2 is very much an extension of the first; individual stories in 90-minute chunks – plenty of time to chuck in a few red herrings and dead ends to confuse the viewer. But it’s entertaining stuff. The obvious comparison is ‘Montalbano’ – the idyllic Italian setting, the sea, the sunshine; there’s even a comedy police officer – Esposito in this case – in the station who adds some amusing levity to the grim task of crime-fighting. It’s no surprise that Lolita Lobosco and Montalbano share many of the same production team.
In the opening episode of S2, Marinella Alvino, a gifted young student in the local university, drowns in what was initially thought to be a scuba diving accident. However, tests reveal the presence of carbon monoxide in her oxygen tank. Therefore, this immediately becomes a murder case.
Lolita (played by the fabulous Luisa Ranieri – very much a Monica Bellucci and Nigella Lawson lookalike) cancels her Egyptian holiday plans and joins her deputy, Antonio (Giovanni Ludeno), to investigate. The tragedy is magnified when Marinella’s boyfriend’s body turns up, too. He’d gone in search for his girlfriend, but appears to have died of natural causes when his oxygen ran out.
A bunch of potential suspects are interviewed and considered – there’s the young couple who were on the boat with them, the owner of the yacht club where the tanks were filled, and Marinella’s jealous roommate to name a few. But when they discover research Marinella had been doing into the lost cargo of a shipwreck in the Black Sea, their investigations shift. Was she targeted because of her discovery of something bad in the water?
Throughout the series there’s the common thread of Lolita’s search for the person or persons who killed her father – a case that has haunted her since his demise. And we get to see a lot of her family – her widowed mother and younger sister. It’s fair to say that there’s a lovely feelgood factor about the show – the characters are endearing and familiar.
If you’re a fan of the aforementioned ‘Montalbano’, or shows like ‘Death In Paradise’ and ‘Mallorca Murders’, this will be right up your street. You don’t need to have seen the first season – these are stand-alone storylines that are nicely tied up after an hour and a half.
It’s not high-brow culture, but if you want to escape to a beautiful Italian location and immerse yourself in the food, the characters and their trials and tribulations, this is the one for you. Enjoy!
Walter Presents: ‘Lolita Lobosco’ Season 2 is available as a full boxset via Channel 4 Streaming from 2nd August 2024.
