'Dead Still' Season 1 - TV Review

The main character in this series is Brock Blennerhasset (Michael Smiley), a photographer in Dublin in the 1880s who specializes in memorial photos of the dead. In the first episode, his niece Nancy (Eileen O'Higgins) comes to live with him to escape their unpleasant family, and he acquires a new assistant in the form of Conall Malloy (Kerr Logan). We also meet Frederick Regan (Aidan O'Hare), an officer in the police who's convinced a series of very similar suicides are actually murders.

Wikipedia calls this a "drama," but it focuses so heavily on its bizarre, low-key humour that the "drama" ends up carrying little weight. Blennerhasset is so emotionally opaque that no one - not us or his niece - has any idea why he does the unkind things he occasionally does. His niece is an improbably "modern" woman, and officer Logan is - while a decent detective - hard for us to take seriously because the series constantly makes jokes at his expense. I found the mystery weak, and was particularly frustrated by the bad guy's hiding-in-plain-sight because in the social circles he traveled in he might well have run into people who recognized him from his previous life. And at the end, they solve the base mystery but leave us with a shadowy conspiracy so they can have another series of this second rate crap. I only struggled through the last three episodes to see it wrapped up, and they refused to even do that ...

Six episodes of 50 minutes each.