This article originally appeared on Den of Geek UK.

Despite the perpetually stuck sofas and the alien ghosts and time travelling, Douglas Adams’ delightfully nutty book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency somehow completely hangs together. For all its weird digressions and laundry list of characters it was clear there was a method to the madness, and with Adams we were always in safe hands. There was never the sense that either Dirk Gently or the follow-up, The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul was too scattershot and ultimately, Adams more or less pulled his various narrative strands together. Could the latest attempt to adapt the story for TV pull off the same thing?

Aside from transplanting Dirk’s Cambridge-based ’80s adventures to a modern Seattle setting and excising characters like Professor Chronotis, BBC America’s flashy new series has a bigger elephant in the room. The man behind it is controversial figure Max Landis, whose talents are actually put to good use here – Landis’ penchant for sharp repartee is entirely in keeping with the source material; all he has to do is turn up the weird factor. The approach of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks is also very Landis-ish but he makes it work better here than he did in, say, tonally confused action-comedy American Ultra.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency has next to nothing in common with the books in terms of plot (stray references to past cases with a sofa and Thor don’t really count) but its connective tissue is the spirit of Dirk Gently, which is manifest here. The BBC America series’ mission statement is exploring the fundamental interconnectedness of things and the subtle connection between cause and effect, which is the bedrock of Dirk Gently. The pilot episode is messy in the extreme; there’s not exactly an A-plot and a B-plot, more of an A-Z-plot, and so there’s a lot to get your head around. Still, when Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency calms down after a couple of episodes it starts to develop its characters and the show builds upon its core mysteries.