Da Vinci’s Inquest – Season 3 (2000 – 2001/Acorn Media DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: B Episodes: C+
Apparently
a big hit in Canada, Da Vinci’s Inquest
ran for seven seasons up until 2005 and now airs in reruns in crappy
wee-hours-of-the-morning slots on CBS and WGNSAT, the latter I can only imagine
is a local station somewhere in Canada. It’s
now coming out on DVD for those leftover devotees and we’re up to Season Three. The season of 13 hour-long episodes is
compiled onto four discs with a few extra features.
The show
is a crime drama set and shot on location in Vancouver, British Colombia, a
fact that the cast and crew is apparently very proud of. According to one of the making-of featurettes,
it was the goal of creator Chris Haddock to incorporate the city as a character
in the show, and it certainly has a different feel from your usual New York cop
drama. It seems less gritty, a bit more
compassionate. In New York cop shows
there’s often this attitude that there is so much crime out there that the
characters have to do as much as they can as quickly as they can to even put a
dent in it. But the characters in Da Vinci’s Inquest seem less like
they’re waging war and more like people doing a job.
That
being said, as a crime drama, the show is only okay. The writing is geared more towards developing
the characters as people and oftentimes the side dialogue that doesn’t directly
apply to the plot of the show is more engaging than the actual crime. In fact the big fault of the show is that it
rarely wraps up the investigation so that the conclusion feels thorough and
satisfying the way CSI or Law & Order does so well.
The show
mostly revolves around the title character, Dominic Da Vinci, who is a coroner
and apparently based on a real person. The cast is large though with around a dozen
regulars some of whom appear more often than others, and who generally get
about two-thirds of each episode to divide amongst themselves, the other third
reserved for Da Vinci.
The
picture is presented in 1.33:1 full screen and has decent quality with only
some slight noise and a bit of softness if you’re really looking. The sound is Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo and
while the quality is, like the picture, a bit soft, the mixing on the ambient
noise is actually fairly well-executed. It’s
apparent that special attention was paid to this detail in an attempt to
hearken back to that city-as-a-character idea.
The
extras, all of which are on the first of four discs, are pleasantly plentiful,
though they’re not all terribly stimulating. The two making-of featurettes, one focusing on
the city, the other on actor Donnelly Rhodes, are well put together,
informative, and just the right length. On
the other hand, the photo slideshow, cast filmographies, and biography of
Haddock are features that would really only be interesting to a super-fan who
was unaware of the existence of IMDB.
The show
is overall very watch-able, but I’m not sure if it’s something I would want to
watch over and over again. But anyone who’s
looking to buy a season of any television show is probably already a fan of the
show and knows what they’re buying; so if that’s the case, then you won’t be
disappointed by this release and the addition of new special features that weren’t
on the releases of Seasons One and Two is an added bonus. You’ll find those sets covered elsewhere on
this site.
- Matthew Carrick
