DCI Banks: An object lesson in how not to run a police department homicide squad.
Wow: Have you seen DCI Banks? That show is hilarious! Everyone is always doing the most unbelievably wrongheaded things imaginable, and they still don't get fired. Ridiculous!
Anyone who has seen this show knows how it's trying hard to be a melding of the British police procedural mystery series and the crappy soap opera stuff they started doing in the CSI shows to try to keep people watching after the novelty had worn off and the interesting stories ran out. (You know, they're all alcoholics or gambling addicts or secret murderers or being stalked by their violent exes who cannot be arrested for unreasonable reasons, etc. Oh, except for the boss, who is sparkling clean, but someone in internal affairs wants to bust them anyway because they seem too clean, or maybe just to get a promotion and an opportunity to gloat, like the guy who finally busted Lance Armstrong. And for all we know, couldn't Mr. Orange Hair Pretentious Sunglasses guy be hiding something?)
Oh, but in DCI Banks, they're all either corrupt, incompetent, or just plain violating ethics and protocol all the time, even the bosses (!). In fact, in the most recent episode, the boss guy is guilty of corruption and commits suicide, and he gets DCI Banks to break all the rules to find his daughter, who ends up dead at home eventually anyway. And Banks could be fired or imprisoned, but he's not, because they are all corrupt or incompetent, and anyone who arrests him could find themselves busted the same day from what everyone else knows about their misbehavior. So it's like a big implied blackmail scheme they all call "loyalty". I'm sure the writers are trying to be "real", but I hope this is nothing like real life!
I mean, in one episode, a woman detective, who tried to bust her own colleagues when they were innocent in the previous episode, has sex with a murder suspect, she lies about it, and to cover her tracks, she goes to talk to the murderer, and he almost kills her (!!). And she does not even get reprimanded for this? And after the murderer gets away, DCI Banks says it's unlikely that they will ever find him again. But they must not be looking very hard, because I found him Friday night on another PBS TV show called: Shakespeare Uncovered, where he is playing MacBeth (another Murderer!) in a stage adaptation of MacBeth on the London stage (!!!). He's in another show on the same network: How lazy can you get?
And in the next episode, they hire a serial killer to be their forensic pathologist, and she gets to alter the evidence. Well, she commits suicide at the end, but from what we've seen of everyone else's behavior, she probably would have been allowed to stay had she lived.
Now, obviously, if you've seen the show, they always catch the bad guy in the end (except for that one time...), but that's just because it's written that way in the script. If this were a real police department, they would never solve any crimes, because they would be too busy arguing and accusing each other of stuff, or contaminating evidence, or abusing suspects, etc. But hey: maybe they would at least get away with it all, right? And maybe they could just railroad someone they don't like who knows their corrupt secrets. There you go!
Boy, what a silly show! Give me Agatha Christie retreads over this crap any day!
