DVD Review
New Tricks: Season 2
 Official Synopsis:
Try telling this lot they're too old for the job. Lane, Standing, Halford and their bullish boss Pullman have not given up on the old cases they are involved in nor on their abilities to solve them yet. Mixing nose-to-the-ground, old school detective work with a fresh take on troublesome cases, the veterans investigate a range of unsolved crimes from the apparently racially motivated attack on a young Asian bride to the mystery of the unidentified torso found in a wood populated by wild boars. Will they succeed where others have failed? Or will the burden of all the years begin to weigh down on them? After all, they all have to grow old some time.
Our Take:
For a long period of time, the British have always been leaps and bounds ahead of us Americans when it came to producing quality television dramas. Thanks to “It’s not TV, It’s HBO” and a more maturing of evening network programming, Americans have closed that gap. This is exactly what makes New Tricks: Season 2 so underwhelming. It feels exactly like your standard American police procedural, but with actors that look like normal people.
New Tricks follows a police crew made up of older officers that investigate cold cases, not using advanced DNA testing, but simple old fashioned investigative techniques like interviewing people and piecing together the scenarios logically. Naturally, this begs the question of why the cases went cold to begin with if they are so easily solved each episode using such simplistic methods. Suspension of disbelief I suppose. Each episode begins with a new case being given to the team and they proceed to investigate it before arriving at the sometimes shocking conclusion of who the killer was. Think Scooby Doo, but with older British men and women and no haunted amusement parks. Special Features:
There are no special features found on this 3-Disc release. Conclusion:
New Tricks comes complete with dramatic tones and quick humorous one-liners, but this type of show simply does not do much for me. While it is easy to get involved in the soap opera-ish murder trails (who was seeing a dominatrix or whose brother-in-law killed which sister-in-law), New Tricks does not have very many new tricks of its own, but feels like similar fare one can see on American television.
Overall Picture:
TV Show: B-
Extra Features: C
- Matthew Orlando
Staff Writer
|
