His drink is scotch and his music is jazz. He is Rev. Sidney Chambers, the vicar of a bucolic community just outside Cambridge. However, his flock have a habit of bumping each other off. As if the funerals did not keep him busy enough, the Anglican cleric also becomes something of an amateur sleuth in the six-part “Grantchester,” which premieres this Sunday on PBS as part of the current season of “Masterpiece.”
It all starts when the heavily indebted Stephen Staunton commits suicide, except he didn’t. After some probing by a parishioner who happened to be the deceased’s mistress, Chambers is soon convinced it was in fact murder.
Initially, this brings him into conflict with Detective Inspector Geordie Keating, who has no patience for a naïve vicar poking his nose in an open-and-shut case. However, Keating soon discovers that he and Chambers are sort of birds of a feather. They have both seen the dark side of life and use distilled beverages to take the edge off.
Poor Chambers’s backstory will plague him throughout the first season of “Grantchester.” During World War II, he fought with the Scots Guards, but something happened during his service that continues to haunt him. While he was picking up the pieces, Chambers reconnected with his ambiguous girlfriend Amanda Kendall, but she is about to announce her engagement to a man more to her aristocratic father’s liking.
