David Mitchell loves TV, comedy and mystery. By starring in 'Ludwig,' he's 'completed the set'

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Set us as preferred “When is ‘Ludwig’ coming back?” is a question I’ve been not infrequently asked since its first season finished on BritBox last spring.(The answer is: Tuesday.) A rich, perfectly balanced mixture of comedy, mystery and human yearning, it stars David Mitchell as John Taylor, an introverted professional crossword puzzle creator called back into the world by his sister-in-law (Anna Maxwell Martin) to impersonate his missing twin brother James, a police detective, in order to discover the reason for his disappearance — and proving, in his socially inept way, born to the job.

This season, his cover blown, he continues the hunt while working for the police as a consultant on individual cases.“He’s liberated from his own shyness when he’s trying to solve the puzzle,” Mitchell said recently over Zoom from London.“A sort of confidence comes over him, and he’s willing to take center stage and boss people around.

And then as soon as the puzzle’s resolved, that confidence seeps away, and he just wants to go home and have a choc ice.”Mitchell, 52, is not especially well known in America, outside the not inconsiderable number of us who live on British humor, but he’s spent his whole adult life making comedy.With longtime, sometime partner Robert Webb, he starred in “Peep Show” (a point-of-view situation comedy) and “That Mitchell and Webb Look” (a sketch show).

In “Upstart Crow,” he played an irascible, credit-stealing William Shakespeare, whose curmudgeonly battles with modernity echo Mitchell’s own, or at least that of the erudite, often alarmed persona he adopts on panel shows — above all the reliably hilarious “Would I Lie To You?,” where he’s served as a team captain since its debut in 2007.Here, in a conversation edited for length and clarity, he speaks about hi...