DA VINCI'S INQUEST/DA VINCI'S CITY HALL
Latest News: Da Vinci's City Hall is wrapping up its second run on Showcase and Da Vinci's Inquest starts up again Friday nights, at 7pm EST from August 31, starting with Little Sister pt. 1. Season two is due out on DVD on November 13. The first few episodes of Da Vinci's City Hall are also appearing (legally) online.
A new Da Vinci movie wrapped up filming on March 3, 2007. No word yet on when it will appear on CBC. It's called "The Quality of Life: A Dominic Da Vinci Movie" (see the trailer here). I'm told that it will be more like Da Vinci's Inquest than Da Vinci's City Hall in tone, though it will follow on the Da Vinci's City Hall storyline and characters. It's due out on CBC this summer. Here are the blurb and cast list:
"While hosting an Urban Crime Conference for mayors from across the country, Dominic Da Vinci and his fellow politicians become peripheral witnesses to a scandalous murder. An ensuing investigation unfolds while Da Vinci continues to try and keep the urban crime conference's agenda - the control of crime in Canada - on track.
"As each of the mayors comes forward to tell what piece of the murder they witnessed, the murder story is revealed in a Rashomon-style narrative that leads to the arrest of the murder suspect. Their participation in this investigation gives Da Vinci the opportunity to convince them of their responsibility as individuals to be proactive in their own cities and to assume responsibility to protect their citizens."
Cast: Nicholas Campbell, Hugh Dillon, Venus Terzo, Patrick Gallagher, Bruce Ramsay, Mary Walsh, Michael Murphy, Benjamin Ratner, Rebecca Robbins, Mylene Dinh-Robic, Alex Diakun, Brian Markinson, Eugene Lipinksi, Hrothgar Mathews.
January 29, 2007: Latest news is that Da Vinci's Inquest season one is being reissued by Acorn Media on February 27, 2007. Also, CBC will be rerunning Da Vinci's City Hall from February 7 onward on Wednesday mornings at 12:30 am and Sunday nights at 11pm.
I also have a page up for Haddock Entertainment's new show, Intelligence, starring Ian Tracey, Klea Scott and Matt Frewer. You can find it here.
It's official--CBC is run by the monkeys. Specifically, they have cancelled Da Vinci's City Hall due to low ratings. Now, I'm pissed off and I wanna do something about it. It's not that I have much faith in letter campaigns or anything, especially considering that CBC wouldn't notice any impact less than an asteroid bullseyeing Toronto, but I wanna have my say. If you wanna have your say, contact CBC here. Be polite and don't use foul language because they won't take you seriously if you do. But by all means, indulge fully in the snark. Incompetence on this level deserves to be heaped high with snark.
If you've sent a letter, by all means, send me a copy and I'll post it here with the ones already up. I'm sure CBC would like to bury them all, but this way, you can guarantee your say. Email me here to do that.
Now, fear not for your Haddock & Co. fix. I still intend to do a review of the season finale on February 28 (tonight) and I will also do a seasonal roundup. Also, it's rumored that CBC has ordered 13 episodes of Intelligence for this year. I'm putting up a page here. In fact, I should do a non-IMDB review for those of you who have not had the good fortune of seeing the pilot. So, don't expect this site to do dead any time soon.
This highly acclaimed Canadian police procedural focused for the first seven years on the office of Vancouver City Coroner, Dominic Da Vinci (Nick Campbell), and the detectives of the Vancouver Police Department's Homicide Division: old dog Leo Shannon and new kids Mick Leary and Angela Kosmo. The character of Da Vinci is loosely based on real-life former coroner and mayor Larry Campbell. Beginning in 1998 on CBC in Canada, the show has run for seven seasons and started its eighth season on October 25. There have definitely been some changes--most notably some new characters, Da Vinci's move to City Hall (he's now Mayor of Vancouver), Mick Leary's replacing him as Coroner and the absence of Donnelly Rhodes as Leo Shannon.
The show has appeared in syndication all over the world. However, it's only now appearing in Australia on Sunday nights at 2:05 am on WIN Television and has just finished up its second season run in the UK on FTN on Sunday nights at nine. FTN will be rerunning the first and second seasons Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10pm starting August 22, 2005. I've also heard from Brit viewer, crystel dream on IMDB, that LivingTV was showing episodes at midnight five nights per week, though I've since heard that they've now stopped.
In the U.S., the show appeared last fall through Program Partners. It looks like the breakout hit that the Canadian television industry has been praying would spearhead the introduction of a whole host of Canadian programming into the U.S. market. Program Partners has sold somewhat related cop shows Cold Squad and Tom Stone (renamed Stone Undercover) south of the border, capitalizing on the confusion following the unexpected merger of the WB and UPN. Get ready for the Canadian invasion, folks. It's not before time, if you ask me. How many more episodes of Survivor, CSI and Law&Order spinoffs can one stand?
In the U.S. Da Vinci's Inquest started on WGN September 13, 2005, with two episodes from season one at 8pm and 9pm EST respectively. It has finished the first seven seasons and started over.
Needless to say (but I'm going to say it), this multiseason jumping around is a little confusing, especially since WGN stared season one with episode four, "The Quality of Mercy" (not my favorite by a long stretch). I guess the three-part series pilot "Little Sister"'s theme of serial necrophilia was a bit much for them. This might also explain the skipping to season three, since season two also focused heavily on sex crimes. Unfortunately, longer storylines, like Kosmo's work on the missing women cold cases, will suffer because it will really confuse new viewers. Leary and Shannon will look pretty popular, though, since a lot of their cases are more-or-less self-contained and they can come across as your classic gumshoe Law&Order-type odd couple, as long as you don't look too hard at Shannon's "old school" methods and Leary's unstable background. "An Act of God" from season three is a classic example. And thank God they ran the Josie Hutchins storyline in order or viewers would have been totally lost.
Other channels (WSBK, KXAS, KCBS, WCBS and KTVD) started their runs of the show from 9/17/05 onward. The main pattern seems to be 6pm and 12am on Saturdays and possible some Sunday showings, usually early Sunday mornings at 1am (for folks like WFFF in Burlington, Vermont) or 4am (for WCBS in NYC, New Yorkers get no better times). You can find an extensive list of local stations with start dates and times here at Patty Winter's site. You can also check Tivo and TVguide.com (thank you, Patrick) for listings. Different stations may edit (i.e. censor) the episodes differently and show them in a different order, particularly ones that are showing them late at night. So, even if you get WGN or more than one station, you may want to shop around (or even buy the DVD), even if it's just to hear what they're really saying when the censors cut out all the cuss words. "This Shit is Evil", for example, was the original title for that particular episode.
Back in Canada, the show is still alive and well. After seven seasons, Da Vinci announced his candidacy for mayor of Vancouver and CBC has changed the show's name to Da Vinci's City Hall for season eight, reflecting the "shift in tone" from police procedural to political thriller starting in season seven. This season began with Da Vinci's first day on the job as mayor, hitting the ground politicking. Meanwhile, Police Chief Bill Jacobs and his familiar Charlie Klotchko are plotting against him, Kosmo has been paired up with old nemesis Joe Finn from IAD and Mick Leary has latched onto a cold case involving a vicious, long-running pedophile ring. Evil Vice cop Brian Curtis returned at the end of November. He threw a serious wrench in Leary's plans just before the show went on Christmas hiatus on December 6. It returned January 10, 2006 with "Gonna Cause a Ruckus" and will have a brief, two-week hiatus for the Olympics before returning with the season finale on February 28.
The new season was originally scheduled for Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 9pm on CBC. Because of the lockout, it began on October 25, instead. The new site is up. CBC's revamped page is here. DVI creator Chris Haddock and Ian Tracey (Mick Leary)'s new tv pilot, a twisty thriller called Intelligence, however, showed on November 28 at 8am on CBC, right on schedule. Meanwhile, the old official DVI site is still up. Hopefully, it will stay up, since there's a lot of info about the old seasons on there.
Showcase is no longer showing Da Vinci's Inquest, presumably because season one is coming out on DVD again.
Da Vinci's Inquest predates the CSIs and other snazzy American shows like Without a Trace. Nor has its style been copied in the way Cold Case ripped off Cold Squad, though USA's Touching Evil had a not dissimilar vibe going with its great music, cinematography and screwed-up detectives. It's safe to say that this show is unique and very, very Canadian. Da Vinci, for example, is not your usual earnest hero. He's a loud-mouth drunk whose ex-wife, Head Pathologist Patricia Da Vinci (sparky Gwynyth Walsh), left him for his boss after he cheated on her one too many times. He's in every episode, of course, but he somehow manages not to dominate the show. The real star is Vancouver and the ensemble cast that represents a cross-section of the city's multi-ethnic population. Nobody is perfect in this show, certainly not the regulars. Homicide detectives Leo Shannon (Donnelly Rhodes) and Mick Leary (Ian Tracey) have as many skeletons in their respective closets as Da Vinci. Meanwhile, the show breaks ground for women by making Shannon and Leary's colleague Angela Kosmo the obsessive maverick every cop show needs, giving Venus Terzo the kind of plum role usually reserved for the macho likes of Clint Eastwood.
I'll be adding content as I go along, including episode info. If you have any news about the show or you want to add a link to a related webpage of yours, you can contact me here.
For those of you who buy TV Guide, I think the last time they actually ran an article on the show was back in August. However, they are doing half-page photo ads for Tuesday listings. So far, it's a different one each week, usually of Nick Campbell. The week of 9/25/05, they also had Donnelly Rhodes and a bit player as well, but the following week was a repeat of an earlier ad. The new, bigger TV Guide actually has fewer listings (no local ones). Gee, that's nice. And the news blackout on DVI continues. However, on page 66 of the week of 10/16/05), there was a very nice, full-page ad by WGN with a big photo of Da Vinci and several smaller photos (some of them ones I haven't seen before) of other show regulars. Someone was trying to sell it on eBay the same week. So...you could have bid on it on eBay starting at seven bucks, or you could have bought it the same week for 99 cents. Ain't capitalism grand?
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the images on this site; I'm just borrowing them. You can find these, and many more, on the show's homepage, along with news, articles and cast info. The show's creator, Chris Haddock, also has a homepage here.
DVD Info: Season one is out on DVD. You can order it on Amazon.ca.
If you'd like to see more seasons, try signing the petition here.
Want to see how DVI's doing in the ratings, find a past article or catch up on news about Da Vinci's City Hall or Intelligence? Check Da Vinci's Inquest sites, articles and lists.
You are visitor number
|
This page was last updated on 7/23/2008
