Hooten & the Lady is Indiana Jones-Style TV Fun

This review originally appeared on Den of Geek UK.

If you missed the first episode of Hooten & the Lady, don't worry — you've seen it before. Granted, not necessarily in that order or in those exact words, but you've definitely seen it.

I'll jog your memory: Posh girl with chutzpah is thrust into an antagonistic partnership with untrustworthy rake. Ring any bells? At one point, aforementioned rake falls on top of aforementioned posh girl by accident and the sexual tension keeps him pinned there for slightly too long. Nothing yet?

Try this: There's a scene where they're tied up and bickering and have to cut through their ropes using a jagged rock. C'mon now. Through their adventures, they develop a grudging respect for and fascination with each other and it turns out the rakish bounder is not really that much a rake or a bounder. There's a bit where she tells the baddie: "You’re not going to get away with this!"

If none of that sounds familiar, perhaps you spent your youth climbing trees instead of watching Saturday morning cartoons or Saturday early evening repeats of Romancing the Stone, The A-Team and the Indiana Jonestrilogy. Those, along with the likes of Unchartedand Tomb Raider are Hooten & the Lady’s storytelling touchpoints.

All of which adds up to a great deal of fun, helped immeasurably by the talent and charm of Ophelia Lovibond (who has been so good in so much for so long it's about time she played the lead in her own series). Here, she's the wilful, charismatic Lady Alexandra Lindo-Parker, an explorer and reluctant aristo in the employ of the British Museum. If this were The African Queen — which it sort of is for a stretch along the Amazon — she'd be the Katherine Hepburn to Michael Landes' Humphrey Bogart.

Landes plays Hooten ("There's no Mr."), an American adventurer thief with a quick tongue, an eye for the ladies, and a thirst for cash. There's more to him than puns and venality though. A brief scene in which he posts the cash proceeds of an illicit diamond sale through the door of a Brazilian orphanage reveals that much.

Landes also reveals much in his brief nude scene, which, aside from some mild sexual content and a solitary "dickhead," explain why this otherwise family-friendly adventure is airing at 9pm and not at in a weekend teatime slot. Over the next seven episodes, perhaps the two leads' obvious chemistry develops into something worthy of being post-watershed.

Co-created by British soap EastEnders’ Tony Jordan, Hooten and the Lady is an action-adventure-romance with a high dangling quotient. The leads dangle upside down from traps, dangle from branches over precipitous drops and, thrillingly, dangle from helicopters in flight. The premiere's climactic action scene was the kind of good old-fashioned cheese that made me feel happily as though I was eight years old, sat cross-legged in front of the TV and about to be called in for my tea.

The verdict? It's enjoyably retro, with a great lead and a comfortingly familiar story. Next week: a different country, a different lost archaeological treasure and with any luck, more dangling.

Hooten and The Lady airs on Friday nights on Sky One in the UK. An American release date is yet to be announced.