Haunted by the specter of discarded episodes of Foyle's War

Employing a combination of DVD sets at our local public library, Amazon Prime Video streaming, and then Acorn towards the end, my husband and I managed to watch with great interest and affection (and speed, I might add) ALL seasons of Foyle’s War—a British mystery series set during and after World War II.

Even as we were watching the final seasons, we understood that its 8 seasons of actual programming somehow ended up running over the course of 13 years since the series began late in 2002 and then stopped briefly, and then began again, to conclude finally in 2015. And when we heard the backstory behind reasons for stopping and restarting the series, we were both incensed.

The show’s Wikipedia page explains, “After five series, Foyle's War was cancelled abruptly by ITV director of programmes Simon Shaps. This forced [screenwriter Anthony] Horowitz to discard scripts set during most of 1943 and 1944, resulting in time jumps of nine months to a year between episodes; previous series had gaps of a month at most. In April 2008, the presumed final episode, ‘All Clear’ (during which the end of the war is announced) was broadcast.”

What this meant was that there could have, should have, and would have been MANY more episodes of Foyle’s War which its throngs of fans missed out on because a network executive made a wrong-headed decision.

According to The Guardian, the show had been cancelled by ITV in 2007 because

The channel had thought the show was "growing tired" and that it had to modernise to attract younger viewers and please advertisers. But viewers wrote furious letters to newspapers and complained to the broadcaster, asking for more. The seventh series,* which was to have been the last and jumped to VJ Day, attracted 7.6 million viewers. It was screened in 2010, but by then a new regime headed by ITV's director of television, Peter Fincham, was in place and the new series was commissioned.

And, really, if we’d known that there was a letter-writing campaign to bring back Foyle’s War, we might have joined. In large part, it’s the excellent and understated acting of the lead Michael Kitchen as Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Foyle which retains viewer loyalty. (His assistant/driver/“sidekick” Samantha “Sam” Stewart is great too, played with spunky charm by Honeysuckle Weeks, but really it’s Michael Kitchen’s show.) His DCI Foyle makes you want a policeman as your friend, neighbor, father, boss, compatriot. He just seems like a decent human being at a time when so many indecent things were going on.

NPR explains the show’s broader appeal this way:

Foyle's War was created by Anthony Horowitz who knows how pop culture can examine uncomfortable truths. He uses Foyle's cases to poke holes in the romanticized mythology of Britain's heroic war effort. It's not that the show is cynical, but Horowitz shows how, even under mortal threat from the Nazis, not everybody was pulling together. Crooks keep doing crooked things and the class system keeps reinforcing inequality. . . .

Absolutely agreed. In a way, could one argue that Kitchen’s/Horowitz’s Foyle is perhaps too much of a fantasy? As the NPR piece notes, “Played with quietly barbed charisma by Kitchen, Foyle is clearly an idealized version of British manhood, from his tamped-down emotions to his bone-dry wryness to his innate loyalty and sense of honor.” But perhaps an invitation to root for an “idealized version”—both of “British manhood” and police detective—especially in a chaotic world 21st century is exactly what this show offers.

Every once in a while, we still wonder about the extra episodes that might have been. . .

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*Please note the different practices of numbering seasons between American and British reporting. So, for instance, U.S. media might call “All Clear” the final episode of Season 5, but the British system places that VJ Day episode as the end of Season 7. Often, British TV treats the pilot episode as Season 1, and then the rest of the episodes for that year as Season 2. In the case of Foyle’s War, the fact that Season 4 has a Part 1 and a Part 2 might be adding extra confusion.