June 16, 2008
NETFLIX FODDER:
The Best TV Cop Show is...Canadian? (Tim Heffernan, 6/16/08, Esquire)
Into this musty attic, Canada’s Da Vinci’s Inquest comes like a cool breeze off the Pacific. The Da Vinci of the title is Dominic (played by Nicholas Campbell), chief coroner of the city of Vancouver and a man who has learned to tread lightly on the blood-soaked paths his job leads him down. He does the usual police-procedural things—solves crimes, questions authority, rubs his bosses the wrong way--but he never gives off the air, so common to his American counterparts, of a beleaguered saint. Our detectives treat murder as a dark window on the human condition. This, we are solemnly admonished, is death. On Da Vinci’s Inquest, the attitude is: that’s life. [...]Da Vinci’s Inquest is not The Wire; it’s a primetime crime drama—pure entertainment—but it’s a great one. A smart one. You never actually need to watch its American counterparts: you know exactly what’s going to happen before the first chung-chung stops echoing. Da Vinci, though—you want to check in with him on now and then. See what he’s been up to. It’s always something interesting, and it’s always a good story. That, as they say in showbiz, is entertainment.
Great may be overstating the case. It's similar to CSI in the seeming pleasure it takes in excessive gore and sadism and it shares the annoying tendency of the not entirely dissimilar British series, McCallum, of having character's personal lives intertwine with the crimes they're investigating. But it is well done and the characters are interesting enough it does compel viewing. While we're at it, you could make a fourth stop in the Anglosphere and check out the Australian series City Homicide, not available on DVD here, but you canb snag the torrents here.
Comments
Which program plays a torrent?
Posted by: erp at June 16, 2008 3:34 PM