New Tricks

New Tricks is a characteristically well-acted and lavishly produced BBC police procedural. The show is apparently popular in the UK and there are ten years worth of episodes, 97 shows in total.  (The program airs on BBC 1; in the UK, season 11 episodes are currently being aired on a weekly basis.)  You can watch the show on Netflix and DVDs of all past seasons are available in this country.  The program is mildly entertaining and reasonably engaging.  It's the kind of show that I would probably watch as aired weekly if it were shown in the United States.  However, there's nothing particularly memorable about any of the programs -- this is genre TV that is amusing, forgettable, an instantly disposable diversion.  The premise of New Tricks is that a perky young police woman, a detective on the force is disciplined for alleged misconduct (she doesn't fit in with "old boy" network); her punishment consists of being exiled to a basement office where she is directed to solve "cold cases" using a team of three elderly retired coppers.  The show is droll and witty:  it's comedy arises from the interactions between the young and pretty policewoman and the old cops with their antediluvian attitudes and prejudices.  As it happens, the superannuated coppers are eccentric and interesting characters in their own right, have compelling backstories, and each possesses his own set of skills brought to bear on the various unsolved "cold cases" on which they work.  The formula is a successful one and, although, all of the shows are more or less alike, they are generally fun to watch.  The plots make sense and are usually plausible.  The writing is literate.  Typically, someone has accidentally killed someone else -- the series has a high quotient of deaths by impalement or one-punch head injury.  The inadvertent murderer conceals the body, either successfully in that it is never found until the denouement or unsuccessfully -- in which case the killer goes undetected.  Some event triggers reopening of the case:  usually enigmatic new evidence is fortuitously discovered.  A singularly unpleasant wicked person, often a tycoon or business mogul, is set up as the leading suspect.  The bad guy, who is a red herring, gets to chew up the scenery while demonstrating his villainy, as Shakespeare would have it:  "tearing a cat" and "out-Heroding Herod."   But the bad guy isn't the culprit.  Usually someone much more mild-mannered and, seemingly, amiable turns out to be the killer -- hence, the fact that most of the murders are inadvertent.  The actual killer generally confesses when confronted with a fierce cross-examination led by the lady detective, the men call her "guv'nor."  Apparently, the show became stale in its ninth season and two of the actors playing the old coppers refused to renew their contracts for the 11th series -- they depart from the show in season 10, but are replaced by equally worthy successors.  Their "guv'nor", Sandra Pullman, also departs from the show in the eighth episode of Season Ten.  Truth to tell, after ten seasons she was getting a bit "long in the tooth" herself and the contrast between the ambitious younger woman and her elderly wards was becoming imperceptible.  Sandra Pullman was replaced by a much younger female detective to perpetuate the "odd couple" mismatch between boss and employees that generates much of the show's interest and tension.  The program is filled with pointlessly spectacular camera-work -- night scenes are rim-lit and look like Caravaggio and everything is big and lavish:  for instance, a scene in a private hospital uses a crane to track down through a huge marble atrium and the interiors are crammed with extras all of them dramatically lit.  It's a 30 second shot but characteristic of the show.  It's as if the camera crews have lost interest in the plots, which are formulaic in any event, and devote their energy to devising complex tracking shots and weird dislocating effects using mirror -- all of this extraneous to the narrative.  The show has a predilection for lighting its characters brilliantly from above and each episode features several shots that are so splendidly composed and let that they look like beautiful still lives.  The minor characters, a rogues gallery of crazies, low-rent mobsters, and corrupt politicians, are all acted with tremendous enthusiasm -- the program is a showpiece for bravura acting by minor players who get to strut their stuff in big close-ups.  There is always a widow or bereaved sibling who cries picturesquely while demonstrating typical British reserve, a stiff upper lip.  The various suspects are often grotesques -- there was one guy who acted more effectively with his furrowed forehead than most American actors can act with their voice and whole bodies.   This is typical BBC virtuoso stuff.  The transitional episodes, the 8th, 9th, and tenth, episodes in Season 10 are illustrative as to how a show can shed all of its signature characters and still remain reasonably compelling.