Reply #4: But wait! There's more!

[Lydia Leftcoast]

City of Vice is a miniseries about criminal justice in London in the 18th century. It is very dark---LITERALLY--because the director decided to use only the light that would actually have been available at any given time and place in the 18th century. Having toured some 18th-century manor houses, I was struck by a scene in which a family is huddled in one room with only a candelabra and a fireplace for illumination.

New Tricks is about a policewoman who is picked to head up a cold case squad with a bunch of washed-up older cops. This one has some comedy elements, and the older cops are all real characters.

Waking the Dead does not have any comedy elements. It's also about a cold case headed up by a real neurotic who is prone to outbursts and is tormented by the unsolved disappearance of his son. This show differs from the U.S. series Cold Case in that the personalities of the investigators play a larger part, and there are side plots involving their personal lives.

Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane of the Harry Potter movies, is a 1990s classic about a psychology professor who consults with the police and whose personal life is messy in several ways.

For a variation on the cozy English village mystery, there are the cozy Scottish village mysteries of Hamish Macbeth.

I've listed mostly mysteries that were never shown on PBS, and there are some in my Netflix queue and on my iTunes wish list that I haven't seen yet, including Trial and Retribution, Wycliffe, A Mind to Kill, and The Helen West Mysteries. I wish that Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries would be released on DVD, but so far, they're available only on British VHS, which will not play on American VCRs unless run through a tape conversion machine.

For those who have region-free DVD players, I recommend Ashes to Ashes, which is a sequel of sorts to Life on Mars. In this one, Keeley Hawes (formerly of MI-5/Spooks) is sent back to the 1980s and meets up with some of the same characters who were in Life on Mars. It starts slow but gets much better.