The British drama Vera starring Brenda Blethyn ran for 14 seasons and I watched every episode from beginning to end in the last five days of my BritBox holiday subscription. Binge-watching has its drawbacks and it’s with what you notice because you’re seeing it quickly in succession. Here’s what I found:
Backstory. You’ve heard me say that I don’t like it when the main character has so much back story that it takes episode after episode to unpack it. It’s a bit easier when you’re bingeing because the episodes come one after the other; it’s not as drawn-out but still. You never really do figure out her clearly dysfunctional childhood story.
Team Development. She says repeatedly that her family are her colleagues but those colleagues must get whiplash as she alternates between thanking them for good work and then excoriating them for not getting the job done. She can be really mean. And if anyone barks back, she goes deadly quiet and puts them “in their place”. In 14 seasons Vera rejects almost all overtures by these colleagues, from not wanting to be a godmother to never going out for drinks with the team. Once she had dinner with her sergeant’s family – just once. She doesn’t seem to know anything about her team and their lives outside the office despite years of working together.
Repeat dialog. What are we missing? We’re missing something. Something is missing. This dialog usually happens about ¾ the way through each episode. Every episode. I suppose if you weren’t binge watching, you might not notice this.
Lying. Every single person who is interviewed by Vera and her team lies. All of them. Not just the murderer, not just the shady person who has motive but isn’t the killer, not just the neighbor down the street who heard the shots… all of them. Usually by the end, they have all recanted their lies. It makes you wonder if there is something in the water in the UK.
Perry Mason theory of killer identification. Decades ago, my dad and I came up with this theory — any character who is on screen or has dialog more than three times, but doesn’t really have any strong tie to the story usually turns out to be the murderer. And you can’t usually figure out the motive ahead of time. My dad and I would shout out who we thought it was and IF you could come up with any sort of close motive, you got extra credit for that. Anyway, that leads to my Vera theory of killer identification. There is almost always one main motive path: corrupt financial business, past returning to bite you in the butt, blackmail… all the regulars. But you can throw most of these out; all the time spent tracking all this down is wasted because the murderer is almost always someone very close to the victim, not connected to that motive and it’s almost never pre-meditated. The son, the daughter, the mother, the father, the wife, the husband, even the best friend. And just like those Perry Mason shows, you won’t always get the motive until the very end. Vera has a very annoying habit of looking at something given to her by her team (usually a piece of paper or something on a pad) and charging off without letting us, the audience, know what has just been discovered.
Anyway, I’m making it sound like I didn’t like the series or the characters. I actually did. In fact, in the second to the last episode, one of her team (Kenny) got clobbered and I thought for sure he was done for and I got really upset. SPOILER ALERT… Kenny survives the attack but we don’t know that until the next episode. The jury is still out whether I would have enjoyed it more or less if I had been watching it weekly for years rather than watching 14 seasons in five days! Guess we’ll never know.
Any series you’ve been enjoying lately? Bingeing or not?
Trail Baboon 