Tag: Vera Stanhope

Vera, Series 9

(ITV, 2019)

More of the same, though with a movement towards cold cases. Vera heads a large team operating in a region of England where the lights (and sun) are always dim, and there is never more than one unrelated murder at a time.

Vera, Series 8

(ITV, 2018)

Vera has by now lost almost all her prickliness, deploying instead a matronly empathy (though also a tendency towards gleeful sly cunning). The four feature-length murder investigations work well enough, though again with absolutely everyone even peripherally involved determined to hide something.

Vera, Series 7

(ITV, 2017)

Almost comforting in its bleak scenarios and manufactured mysteries­—where everyone is hiding something and the killer (lurking least obtrusively in the background) has covered their tracks in ways that would be wholly ineffective if not for great concatenations of obfuscating coincidence.

Vera, Series 6

(ITV, 2016)

One of the better series. Vera is at her most believable, her quirks more the product of underlying personality than of plot or manufactured idiosyncrasy. The murder investigations yield to regular police work, their challenges not weighed down by layers of coincidence.

Vera, Series 5

(ITV, 2015)

Vera is less misanthropic this series, becoming almost cuddly in her dealings with colleagues and suspects. Three of the four investigations entail murder schemes or cover-ups that, divested of obfuscating coincidences, reveal the perpetrator to have acted without a jot of sense.