Inspector Morse's departure from our screens and lives left a gap that was not easy to fill, but Vera seems to have stepped right into his shoes. Brenda Blethyn is a talented actress who brings life to the well-written plots of this new TV crime drama. The setting, in and around Newcastle, is charming too, very different from gritty inner city dramas as well as from picture perfect villages that are typically the sites of crime shows. The relationship between Vera and her sergeant mirrors that of Morse and Lewis (the single work obsessed detective and his long-suffering family oriented colleague). While Morse as a fifty-something bachelor was presented as an oddly desirable, enigmatic, man with his occasional liaisons, Vera as a fifty-something single woman is depicted as lonely and frumpy. Morse's love of booze was endearing; Vera's is merely pathetic. This is, sadly, a realistic comment on the different ways in which single men and women are perceived the world over. Unlike Morse, which was pretty much a two-character series, this one involves the larger detection team as well. The resolution is not the result of inspired, instant, intuition, but careful detection. I watched the series in reverse order, and preferred series 2 to series 1; the second episode of the second series is superb.
Review of Vera
