Waking The Dead – The Complete Season Three (2003/BBC DVD)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Episodes: C

 

 

It has been a while that Waking The Dead has been a hit on TV and I had previously only seen it in bits and pieces, but the new Complete Season Three DVD got me to watch and unfortunately, it is one of the flattest and most forgettable of all the police procedural series (of so many) now in production.  A “cold case” type series, there is enough science here for a college course, yet it never is as convincing as something like Quincy, M.E. overdoing the tech side too much as most of the shows in this cycle do.  Being a British show does not help in this case.

 

These are telefilms and on 2 DVDs include the following four installments:

 

Multistorey

Walking On Water

Breaking Glass

Final Cut

 

The cast (including Holly Aird, Sue Johnston, Trevor Eve, Claire Goose & Wil Johnson) are not very memorable together, though they can act, but these scripts may actually be restricting him.  It also is another one of those slick shows that takes realism and makes it less so.  If you are interested and have never seen the show, you should start at the beginning, but I can’t imagine it being much better then.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is slightly fuzzy throughout and has a style that includes the usual shaky camera work, editing that is overdone and denatured shots here and there.  Nothing is memorable about its style.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo mix is not bad, but like many of these shows, seems to be in an unspoken contest to outdo each other with slick sound design and no point.  There are no extras.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo