Taggart Set Three (2004 05/Acorn Media DVD Set)
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: D Episodes: C
Even long
after it original star Mark McManus passed away as Taggart, the big hit police
procedural TV series from Scotland
continued as Taggart without him and
is still running since its debut on the mid-1980s. For whatever reason, audiences loved the show
so much that they stuck around. It
switched from a series of telefilms to episodes, and by 2002 would go TV
widescreen, which is where Acorn Media decided to pick the show up from.
You can
find reviews for each of the prior two sets at the following links:
Set One
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/8332/Taggart+%E2%80%93+Set+One+(200
Set Two
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9598/Taggart+%E2%80%93+Set+Two+(200
All of
the world's C.S.I. and Law & Order type shows just blend
together for me, but I've still managed to catch episodes of something or other
when nothing else was on or someone else had control of the remote. While nothing I'd seen up to this point had
ever been enough to sway me into liking crime dramas, I had hopes that maybe
the Brits could do it in a way that would be appealing, but Taggart proved to be no different than
the crop of stuff we currently have over here. I would actually rate it a few notches below
my feelings for other shows mentioned due to its slower pace and characters
that manage to be even less interesting than their American counterparts.
While I
would still like to catch some of the earlier McManus episodes of the show,
these current sets just aren't my cup of tea.
Longtime viewers of the show should assuredly be able to detect a
decline in the series quality, as the content of these telefilms just doesn't
click all the time. Still, with as long
as this has been on the air, I'm sure to be in the minority of people who feel
this way.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.78:1 image can look a good from show to show. There is some stylizing that pulls the
fidelity down, but it is not to the point of being a joke or a visual clich้. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is not bad, with
Pro Logic type surrounds comparable to those on the previous set. This set continues on having no special
features, so it would seem that only the first Acorn set was ever slated to
have any.
- David
Milchick
