DCI Banks (My rating: 5)

Though darker and more intense than most you'll see here

While DCI Banks is the subject of this review, I must first digress a bit as the star of the series is Stephen Tompkinson. For many years, our local WETA-UK channel ran every morning, two BBC shows that over the years – generally watching in pieces over breakfast – I must have seen all of several times over: Monarch of the Glen (2000-05, set in Scotland) and Ballykissangel (1996-2001, set in Ireland). They became like old friends. In the latter, Tompkinson played Father Peter Clifford – an English Catholic priest exiled to a small Irish village. Mostly a light comedy, the Father tragically falls in love with the local pub owner, the lovely Assumpta Fitzgerald (played by Dervla Kirwan).

DCI Banks draws from the 28 books by Peter Robinson. I’ve not read them but came to the show in 2013 when PBS began airing it, in part because I was surprised by Tompkinson’s transformation from priest to detective. Turns out that the series is considerably darker and more intense than most of the British crime shows I’ve watched. (Interestingly, in DCI Banks, Tompkinson again plays a character who develops a questionable relationship and with a similar ending.) The tone of the series, which ran for five seasons (2010-16), is set in the first show. It opens with discovery of a horrible crime and features Banks’ driven impulsiveness and rule breaking. As the series unfolds, he finds his match in DS Annie Cabbot, someone who also seems to have few limits. Cabbot, played by the spectacularly attractive Andrea Lowe, follows in the footsteps of another rule-breaking DS (Barbara Havers in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries) but adds a bit of vamping.

Each episode, produced by ITV and streaming now on Britbox, runs 90 minutes. As an extra added feature, Caroline Catz (of Doc Martin fame) joined the series in season two as an uptight DI. Though never to the degree common in American TV, DCI Banks does portray blood and violence – and often armed response teams – it is a solid 5.