A one-woman show featuring a sixty-something lead, forty pounds overweight with an apparent cardiac condition. This may be the first series in which the title character drops dead from natural causes in the middle of the episode. No one's done that since Moliere!
DCI Vera Stanhope dominates her staff on the Yorkshire police even more completely than Brenda Leigh Johnson did on "The Closer". Except for one handsome young Detective Sergeant and one bright, African-descended female Detective Constable, the rest are actually nobodies. Their names aren't used and they have little identity.
And Vera gets emotional--oh, yes. Shouting at her staff, banging the table while interrogating suspects, gasping for air. But unlike Brenda Leigh, of the LAPD, DCI Vera has no fortyish Fritz, handsome if slightly flawed FBI Agent, to come home to. In truth Vera seems to have no private life, at least in the episodes that have aired in the States on PBS.
The stories are dreary, dreary as the English Midlands with their vanished industries and bleak moorlands. Women are principally the victims, of course, and immigrants. When the men aren't knocking the tar out of helpless orphan girls, they're backshooting kindly Sikh taxi drivers.
DCI Vera Stanhope dominates her staff on the Yorkshire police even more completely than Brenda Leigh Johnson did on "The Closer". Except for one handsome young Detective Sergeant and one bright, African-descended female Detective Constable, the rest are actually nobodies. Their names aren't used and they have little identity.
And Vera gets emotional--oh, yes. Shouting at her staff, banging the table while interrogating suspects, gasping for air. But unlike Brenda Leigh, of the LAPD, DCI Vera has no fortyish Fritz, handsome if slightly flawed FBI Agent, to come home to. In truth Vera seems to have no private life, at least in the episodes that have aired in the States on PBS.
The stories are dreary, dreary as the English Midlands with their vanished industries and bleak moorlands. Women are principally the victims, of course, and immigrants. When the men aren't knocking the tar out of helpless orphan girls, they're backshooting kindly Sikh taxi drivers.