West Cork and unsolved crimes have become international televisions hot new trend. In 2021 there was a head to head between two true-crime documentaries about the murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier, Jim Sheridans Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie and Netflixs Sophie: A Murder in West Cork. And this year ITV aired its adaptation of Graham Nortons Holding, about a fictional cold-case killing in the 1990s.

Now the Obamas are getting in on the action. Cameras start rolling next week in the fishing village of Union Hall and around Glandore on their latest production, Bodkin. Described as a darkly comedic thriller, it will chronicle the adventures of a motley crew of podcasters investigating the disappearance of three strangers in an idyllic Irish coastal town.

With West Cork Noir a well-trodden genre, the concept does not sound particularly originalbut it represents new ground for Barack and Michelle Obama and their Higher Ground production company. Since striking a multimillion-dollar deal with Netflix, the former US president and first lady have focused on nonfiction. Barack was last seen channelling his inner David Attenborough with the natural-history documentary Our Great National Parks; Michelle has popped up hosting Waffles + Mochi, where she shared the screen with a sentient Japanese rice cake and a talking waffle. (This is in contrast to the Trump presidency, when the talking waffle was in the White House.)

Bodkin sounds like a lot of things. A Hobbit on the sex offenders register. A forthcoming Nintendo Switch platform game. A brand of English cider. What it doesnt suggest is a village in west Co Cork

But Bodkin is something different: a scripted series that might struggle to feel any better designed to cash in on the global craze for west Cork and true(ish) crime. It stars Will Forte, the Saturday Night Live comedian, as Gilbert Power, an American podcaster on the hunt for his next big story. Gilberts family emigrated from Cork, we learn, and he is hoping to discover his Irish roots.

The cast also features Siobhn Cullen, last seen in as a truth-seeking Dublin journalist in The Dry, Element Pictures rip-roaring comedy about an alcoholic Irish woman from a family of typically Irish heavy drinkers, which for some reason has yet to air in Ireland, and Chris Walley, of Young Offenders, who plays a typical Irish country lad feckless, up for a laugh.

Wait. What? Feckless and up for a laugh? The more you read about Bodkin, the less it sounds like west Cork true-crime redux and the more it sounds like Amy Adamss Leap Year, aka Darby OGill: The Relationship Years. Alarm bells clang further as we discover that Bodkin is the name of the village in which the show is set.

Which leads you to wonder if the closest anyone involved in the series has been to Cork is a true-crime-podcast feed. (The credits of Bodkins co-show runner Alex Metcalf include Amazons dreadful reboot of the conspiracy thriller Utopia.) Bodkin sounds like a lot of things. A Hobbit on the sex offenders register. A forthcoming Nintendo Switch platform game. A brand of English cider. What it doesnt suggest is a village in west Co Cork.

We've been here before: Johnny Depp in Ireland in 1995. Photograph: INM/Getty

Weve been here before, of course. Or at least some of us have. When I was a student living at home in Midleton, the nearby village of Ballycotton received the Hollywood treatment after the news that Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp were to shoot a movie there.

One late afternoon my friends and I went down to see the set for ourselves (having first driven around on the lookout for Depp, whom wed heard was drinking in a local boozer). Ballycotton had been turned into a twee Neverland, with toe-curling signposts and shopfronts that made the town look as if it had come straight from the 1890s rather than the 1990s.

Divine Rapture was, notoriously, derailed by funding issues. That wont be a problem in the case of Netflix and the Obamas. Still, you have to wonder, will Bodkin be a love letter to west Cork, or will the Obamas instead be party to the pumping into the world of more OBlarney? Perhaps we should hope for the bestand brace ourselves for the diddley-dee worst.

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The Obamas' new TV series is about to start filming in Ireland. Brace yourself for the diddley-dee worst - The Irish Times