I’m only in Season 7 so far. I love the characters. Brian Lane is my favorite (as with others in this thread). Alun Armstrong is wonderful.
Here he is in Les Miserables.
Dennis Waterman (Gerry) is also excellent. His portrayal is flawless. Plus he used to be married to Rula Lenska!
No complaints about Sandra or Jack, I just don’t find their characters quite as compelling. The actors are top-notch.
Holy crap! He is brilliant in that! 
I’ve bailed on the show, for reasons that may become obvious to you at some point. I also love Brian. But I love each of the guys for different reasons.
The funny thing is, when I first saw that performance many months ago, I thought, “That guy is really compelling! I don’t know who he is, but he’s great! I wonder what else he’s done.” Then I started watching New Tricks three weeks ago, and thought, “That guy is really compelling! I don’t know who he is, but he’s great! I wonder what else he’s done.” So I googled, and there he was!
Just started watching because of this thread!
To me the dog bit was essential to make sure we got the title reference. To really hammer it in the have one of the exes declare “better the dog you know” to get corrected to “devil”. They wanted a reason for her to be shifted off her path, not killing a person, even justified, but bad PR, and to have us saying “dog … new tricks … oh.”
We have been bingeing this, and I thought tonight to look to see whether there had been a thread, and hey presto, there’s been one this year!
We are just getting into season nine, when things start to change. Very sad about that first change, even though I knew it was going to happen in some fashion because I saw one of the late season ensemble pictures.
There are a lot of things I like about the show, but one of them is that, even though each of the three retired detectives has his niche, unlike a lot of shows that expertise crosses all of them. So for example, if someone needs to remember something that happened 20 years ago, it’s not always Brian. And Jack isn’t always the hardass. Some shows handle that very badly.
One of the episodes we just watched was a throwback to the 1850s, and you just know the producers had a hell of a fun time making it.
We’ll be sad to see this end.