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Da Vinci's Inquest is a Winner
God bless the public library system! I was rewarding myself for a particularly harrowing event that I managed to complete with dignity and courage - I speak about visiting my dentist, stop sneering, everyone has an irrational fear of something and mine's NOT irrational, gosh darn it - and I bumped into DaVinci's Inquest. This stylish Canadian crime drama, set in Vancouver, has turned into my newest obsession.
I'm trying to find out why. I love mysteries and puzzles, hence my devotion to CSI, Bones and Numbers. But it's more than that. I got bored with the dumb plot twists and David Caruso of the Miami version of CSI, while I love Vegas and New York [the shows, not the cities, which I detest]. What the good dramas have, that keep me coming back for more, is good characters in believeable situations. This one has one of the major elements of our times - divorced parents trying to co-parent when they can barely stand each other, and the ways that their beloved offspring exploit the parental diconnect for their own stupid purposes. Watching how the inquest proceeds is interesting for everyone, since the show is a big hit north of the border. What I find fascinating and educational is learning how the Great North runs its crime solutions, and inquests, and comparing what I know with what I am learning. I used to be a bit arrogant about how much I know about Canada. Now I am learning how much I don't know. Fortunately, I have more curiosity and humility than arrogance in my personality matrix, so the learning is unreservedly fun. I like the different characters and how they get on each other's nerves and how they work things out. I love the fact that most of the characters are not Beautiful People. I counted 4 BP out of a total of 12 regulars, which is much lower than I'm used to. God bless Canada.
The other aspect of this show that I unreservedly adore - and which has no value for its intended audience - is the opportunity to spend 50 minutes listening to the cadences of Canadian English. Oh, sometimes someone says "eh?" - the same effect is usually rendered as "yeah?" which is something I tack on the end of my questions, too. I am the kind of person who picks up the speech patterns of the people that I listen to most of the day. It's a completely unconscious process, which I can't stop without a lot of conscous effort. I am primarily an aural learner, so perhaps my gravitating to the aural norm is just part of this brain pattern. So, the question becomes, where did I pick up the "yeah?" thing. I started doing it while I was living in North Carolina, where no one talks like that. I have watched myself start to sound like the Beeb if I watch too much BBC on NetFlix. Maybe I was spending more time on the phone with my Canadian friends during that time, and didn't realize I was migrating to sound like them. All I know is that each language, each accent in fact, has a particular rising, falling and stress pattern - the music of the particular accent if you will. All the various American accents have their own music. It is not just the pronunciation; it is also the speed, the way that it sometimes speeds up or slows down in certain places, how the overall composition is created. I love to listen to Canadians talk.
One aspect of this show that the critics love [and which I'm not crazy about] is the realism. In US TV that usually means lots of crude language, prostitution and gory scenes of decapitation. What it means here is that sometimes the bad guys get away with it. Got to admit, I watch videos to get away from reality in which 99% of the time, the bad guys get away with it, in fact I drown in the pain of reality every once in a while and need a full-day of meditation to get strong again. So watching reality isn't a virtue with me. Thank goodness it's only realistic once in a while. When the cops make mistakes and realize it, I love it. When they get blind and stbborn and don't learn from it, not so much fun. But it does make this more engaging than the story where the good guys are never stymied.
Try it out, on NetFlix, on live TV or however you are getting your entertainment these days. Even the library.