This show is amazing. It is only on at 3am here that I can see. I don’t think I’ve seen many episodes in order though and haven’t a clue what season I’ve watched most. There is a running thread about a corrupt narc cop in most of the episodes I’ve seen. Any other fans?
PS Is Vancouver really that grim?
It’s a great show, available on disc too.
I have really enjoyed the few episodes that I’ve seen. I’d like to see the series in order on DVD sometime.
The grim parts of Vancouver are actually much grimmer than they appear on any television program I’ve seen; the downtown east side is probably the bleakest place in Canada. This is often difficult to reconcile with the rest of the city, which can be radiantly beautiful.
Da Vinci’s Inquest is loosely based on Vancouver’s real-life former coroner Larry Campbell, who was elected mayor during the series’ initial run. This change of careers was reflected in the series and its spin-off, Da Vinci’s City Hall. Very bizarre to have a “based on” prime-time drama running more-or-less contemporaneously with all that.
If you like Da Vinci’s Inquest, I strongly recommend that you check out Cold Squad. It is also filmed in Vancouver and likewise represents the city pretty accurately, warts and all. The CBS series Cold Case is a poor imitation of Cold Squad - same basic premise & characters - sort of, “What if Cold Squad was a) American and b) formulaic pablum?”
The way they wrapped up Cold Squad left me literally dumbfounded. (For the record, I think Cold Squad is actually better than Da Vinci’s Inquest.)
I’ll defer to Larry on this one, since he’s likely to know more than me. But I can tell you that when I lived in Toronto, I used to travel to Vancouver frequently on business. For the most part, it is a beautiful city filled with friendly and helpful people, but even the Downtown Eastside made me worry a little when I drove through it. I never really worried about driving through Regent Park or Parkdale or Jane/Finch (Toronto’s problem neighbourhoods), but Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside worried me more than any of those.
I saw an episode of that a few years ago.
The experience is hard to describe. It managed to be both truly boring and truly compelling at the same time. I felt weird.
-FrL-
My BF and I stumbled across this show and fell in love with its weirdness. The perplexing schedule (3am on Saturday nights…sometimes, the season-jumping) made it hard to follow and we gave up.
But once in a while we’ll stumble across it again and get all excited. This is the first I’ve heard its on DVD! I’d love to see more of it, but in a way seeing it once in a while by accident makes it more fun.
I think we were starting to believe we were the only people in the world who ever saw this show. Glad to know there are others!
We got it here in South Africa - I liked it a lot, but it was on at some stupid hour so I didn’t always catch it. I love Canadian cop/crime shows, though, and we do seem to get a few here. The aforementioned Cold Squad was great, and Blue Murder was another good one. And damn, but female Canadian detectives are hotties.
I’ve never heard of Da Vinci’s Inquest, but I like Cold Squad a lot - they show random seasons on a station I get out of Budapest now and then. (Like, they’ll show an episode a day five days a week for a few weeks until a season is over. Then they’ll show another next season three months later.) The best thing about it, imho, is that they don’t solve cases in an hour. It’ll take them a whole season to figure something out sometimes.
Larry, a question about the final season:
Is the final season actually the season where Ali quits because the Canadian government didn’t want her to investigate the murder of a Palestinian guy by a Mossad agent? Because I was startled by that, but due to the strange broadcasting, I couldn’t be sure if that was the last episode of there’s more. If that’s the actual last episode, I’m dumbfounded, too.
What intrigued me the first time I saw it was I was thinking “that’s kinda like America but that’s not America, where the hell is this set?” I was wondering it for ages until I saw the maple leaf flag. I must check out Cold Squad.
I love how in Da Vinci’s Inquest, as well as having a somewhat rough around the edges main character that certain plotlines are not resolved neatly. It seems to have an entropy (i’m not sure if that’s the right word) that other cop shows don’t tend to.
I have been a fan a few years now. It It seems so low key compared to American cop shows. It also seems to be more real.
Nope, it carried on from there. Don’t want to spoil anything for ya, because it came as a total surprise to me.