It’s been a few years since we heard anything from Dirk Gently, the latest effort to turn Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams’ second-best-known sci-fi comedy series into successful TV. Now, Deadline is reporting that the BBC America show—written by intermittently tolerable Hollywood wunderkind Max Landis—has hired Elijah Wood to star. Wood—recently off of playing foil to an Australian dog man on FXX’s Wilfred—won’t be appearing as the titular “holistic detective,” though; instead, he’s been cast as Todd, an original character created for the series.
Acting as a reluctant assistant to Gently—who’s essentially a con man who repeatedly, and inadvertently, wanders blindly into the answers to the surreal problems he’s hired to solve—Todd is described as a sort of anti-Watson, calling his quasi-boss an asshole and insisting that he’s got his own problems to deal with.
Landis’ show is the second in a decade to attempt to adapt Adams’ densely plotted comic novels to the small screen; the last one, released in 2010 and 2012, also gifted Gently with a sidekick, albeit one drawn from the actual books.