tek's rating:

Due South, on CBS (USA) / CTV (Canada)
IMDb; Retro Junk; TVarchive.ca; TV.com; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia

This began as a TV movie, in April 1994. Paul Gross played Constable Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who followed the trail of his father's killer to Chicago, where he teamed up with an American police detective, Ray Vecchio. After the pilot movie, it became an ongoing series. Fraser ended up staying in Chicago at the Canadian consulate and working, in an unofficial capacity, with Ray. Fraser was um... an extremely competent officer, very formal, and sort of stereotypically Canadian. Polite to a fault. Often seemed rather naive, or... something... but wasn't really, at least not as much as he seemed. Ray, meanwhile, was a good cop, but very... let's say informal, and cynical. He and Fraser became good friends, but they remained very different sorts of people. Also, Fraser had a deaf wolf named Diefenbaker. Dief was funny, and pretty cool, and stuff.

Anyway, it was a quite well written and acted show, with good stories, good characters, plenty of humor mixed into the drama. It was a really fantastic show, really. I'm sort of not sure whether I should actually call this a "quirky" show or not, but what the heck? Might as well. Anyway...the show was originally a Canadian-American co-production, but CBS cancelled it... hmmm, Wikipedia says after the first season, but I don't remember that. I'm sure I watched it on CBS for two seasons, anyway, but I do remember the network cancelling it after the second season. (Maybe I'm wrong, though.) After that, there was a hiatus of about a year, before CTV revived it as a purely Canadian series. Apparently for two more seasons. Ray was reassigned to some undercover work in the mob, so we almost never saw him again. However, there was this odd twist about the authorities not wanting anyone getting suspicious because of Ray not being on his regular beat, or whatever, so they assigned another cop, Stanley Kowalski (Callum Keith Rennie), who was clearly not Ray, to take over Ray's regular job and pretend to be Ray Vecchio. So he started working with Fraser. The show (which is vaguely considered a spin-off) was okay, but not as good as the original.

Um... well, I should really get it on DVD sometime and rewatch the whole series (or both series, if we're counting the latter seasons as a spin-off). Also, the show produced two soundtracks, of which I have one (and plan to get the other eventually). Both of them contain at least one song by Gross. All the music is pretty good. Um... and I dunno about you, but when I try to watch the intros on Retro Junk, there's no sound. So here's an extended version of the theme song, by Jay Semko. Not sure what else to say, but if I ever do see it again, maybe I'll write some more.


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