Cut above, cut below

Having been a reader all my life, I like to think I get why JK Rowling is a cut above. It took me some time to appreciate Harry Potter before I too became a fan like everyone else on the planet, but then she went and did The Casual Vacancy and then the Cormoran Strike series and it is now clearer than ever that she is in a class we have had to invent. She isn't a descriptive genius, or the wit at the party but if she is in a room with you, beware, because this woman understands people. Good and evil, betrayal and pettiness, the limits of love, it comes together best in CB Strike, the name for the TV series based on the books. Alas, while the books are pretty near perfect, the TV adaptation, clever, subtle and often brilliantly directed as it may be, lacks a certain something.
Tom Burke is excellent as Cormoran, shaggy, weirdly handsome, paradoxical, as nuanced as Holliday Grainger who plays sidekick and braveheart Robin Ellacott. Their chemistry translates well on screen etc etc but.
If Burke is in a scene with Killian Scott as DI Wardle, it's Scott who has your attention (woefully miscast as he is, Killian should have been the killer). This is the kiss of death for an actor, when your X Factor only hits W.
Let me put it this way, if you watched Ghost in the Shell there is only one actor you notice immediately, waiting for him to return, and that's Pilou Asbaek (you will remember him in Game of Thrones as the extremely untrustworthy (but then who isn't in GoT) Euron Greyjoy). Asbaek has charisma up the wazoo, especially when set against Scarlett Johansson whose bewildering Hunchback of Notre Dame shuffle is only offset by her unfortunate footwear (oh, Rupert Sanders, you lost more than your moral compass in recent years, didn't you?) in failing to hold the viewer's interest. Charlize Theron in Aeon Flux already had the character and look nailed for this role.
But I digress.
I wait with bated breath to watch all episodes of CB Strike, yet since I missed my calling as casting director,
I wait without fully committing. Story of my life, come to think of it.