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Category:    Home > Reviews > Crime > Police Procedural > Drama > BritishTV > Superhero > Comedy > Detroit 1-8-7 (2011)/No Ordinary Family (2010)/Running Wilde – The Complete First Seasons (2010/ABC/Lionsgate DVD Sets)/Vera (2010/Acorn DVD Set)

Detroit 1-8-7 (2011)/No Ordinary Family (2010)/Running Wilde – The Complete First Seasons (2010/ABC/Lionsgate DVD Sets)/Vera (2010/Acorn DVD Set)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Episodes: B-/D/C-/B-

 

 

Will TV shows get better outside of cable pay channels tending to have the best series?  Maybe, but it is not always looking that way.  Now we look at four new shows that run from awful to interesting, all debuting in their first DVD sets from their TV debuts.

 

Detroit 1-8-7 – The Complete First Season (2011) is a new police drama with multiple storylines going on in each show in the same world with Michael Imperioli as the lead in this surprisingly smart, underdiscussed and underseen series that needs and deserves more promotion.  18 hour-long shows are here across four DVDs and it is worth your time to start form the beginning if interested.  Hope this one picks up.

 

On the other hand, the would-be superhero genre series No Ordinary Family – The Complete First Season (2010) is a mess with Fantastic Four alumnus (he will not be back since the movies are being relaunched supposedly) leading the cast of four family member (mother, father, sister, brother… oh brother!) as they crash in the Amazon River only to discover they have superpowers, but the show is like the old British series The Champions for goofs and is horrid from the first scenes.  20 terrible episodes are here across four DVDs and this is one of the worst examples of the genre or comedy or family programming I have ever seen.  ‘Nuff said!

 

Almost as bad and definitely as unfunny is Running Wilde – The Complete First Season (2010) wasting Keri Russell (Waitress) and co-starring Will Arnett as a rich guy who is a moron, so can she help him?  Should she care?  Should we care?  No!  I was stunned how dumb this was and wondered why this was not cancelled after the pilot.  The makers of Arrested Development are supposedly behind this, but that was a far better series.  You get 10 awful shows across two DVDs, showing someone is hedging their bets on this turkey.

 

Finally we have Vera (2010), a new police procedural that is in a bad glut of them, but the show has one thing the others do not: Brenda Blethyn.  As DI Stanhope, she brings more life to her lead role than even the teleplays could, though the four telefilms here (Hidden Depths, Telling Tales, The Crow Trap, Little Lazarus) are well written as mysteries and all based on the books by Ann Cleeves.  I liked the show more than expected down to the supporting cast (David Leon, Wunmi Mosaku, Paul Ritter) that it seems and feels more real than most of its kind of show.  I hope more seasons/series get made.

 

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image in all four cases is sadly much softer all around than I could have expected with weak color, motion blur and other image issues, all shot in HD and not always as well as they could be, though Detroit is stylized and Vera can be oddly overcast, so they might improve in potential Blu-ray editions.  All but Detroit are here in Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, leaving Detroit with Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes and Ordinary with a Dolby 5.1 variant that is very ordinary.  All sound lossy and the ABC/Lionsgate titles are too much towards the front and center channels.  Ordinary has dull bloopers, but there are no other extras to be found on any of these sets.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo


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