Aquarius: Clash of values is cool fun

David Duchovny stars as Sam Hodiak in a scene from television series, Aquarius. Photo / Supplied

Cops and crazies mix it in the days of flower-power LA

Aquarius (TV1, Tuesdays, 9.30pm) is a cop show in which the baddie is a fictionalised Charles Manson before he went completely off his rocker - although a pre-completely-off-his-rocker Manson is still pretty crazy, man.

As is LA in 1967, two years before the murder of Sharon Tate, which looks like your mother's photo album - had your mother been a hippy living in LA in 1967. It is all sunshine and long-haired boys and girls and dungarees and mini-skirts and freaks and flowers and dope and peace and love and riots. And vacuous utterances, mostly from Charlie.

The lights of the LA highway represent a snake which wants to eat up everyone, but Charlie and his followers will instead eat the snake. Okaaay Charlie.

Here Charlie (played by Gethin Anthony with gleeful stoner craziness) is a fool with a guitar and aspirations to become a star; he is already a petty crook. He has to have some charisma because he gets all the girls. Girls in the LA of 1967 just have to be pretty and have long hair and be happy to sit around looking adoringly at boys with long hair.

Emma, a pretty 16-year-old with long hair, runs away from her privileged but unhappy home - her father is a Republican lawyer with political aspirations who has been up to no good; her mother is an unhappy homemaker whose job it is to keep up appearances, her own included. Dad has had some dealings with Charlie who turned up at the end of the first episode to enact some really revolting revenge.

Dad doesn't want an official investigation of Emma's disappearance; that would be bad for his image and, it is becoming apparent, might well involve digging about in his murky dealings. So mum calls in her ex-boyfriend, detective Sam Hodiak, who is David Duchovny playing David Duchovny, which means being cooler than anyone else on the planet even when, as he is here, he is playing a square.

Hodiak is an old-fashioned cop and an old-fashioned chap who doesn't get all of this free love and love beads and who regards the freaks as freaks. He wears a crewcut in the age of Aquarius and a suit and tie and is a war vet watching the freaks riot.

His partner, Brian Shafe (Grey Damon) is a new-age cop, down with the kids enough to go undercover to smoke dope with the kids to find Manson. This relationship is supposed to provide the tension: A clash of values; age versus new age; hairy dudes versus clean-cut ones. This is just as well, really, because spinning out the chase for Charlie already feels a bit daft. If everyone knows Charlie and he gets all the girls, you'd think they'd have just followed the wafts of dope smoke and already found him and Emma. But where would be the fun in that?

Even a fictionalised Charles Manson seems to still have some strange, if repellent, allure. He's no figure of fun but the writers must have had some fun giving him lines like these: "I pulled her out of the womb of ignorance and into the light of now." It's just the sort of rot you can imagine him saying and the sort of rot you can imagine getting as boring as dope smokers, fairly quickly. But it's always fun watching Duchovny being cool even when he's not supposed to be. And the music is really really cool.

- TimeOut