Review of Blood Ties: The Complete First Season

Introduction

Canadian television is horribly undervalued as an export. There are a lot of high-quality shows coming out of the land of Mounties, bacon and William Shatner, but they don`t get the attention outside of their homeland that many of them deserve. Partly down to big name broadcasters forgoing their rights for more marketable stuff (much of it made-for-export in Canada), homegrown greats like `ReGenesis`, `Intelligence` and `This Is Wonderland` tend to be buried on lesser-watched channels, if they make it out at all. And DVD rights and releases are even worse - take `ReGenesis` for example; popular in Canada, but not available on DVD there. Catching on in the States, but no DVD release. Virtually unknown in the UK, but we`re treated to the first season from Universal Playback, with the second season exclusively available in... France?

Anyway, I digress. `Blood Ties` is another Canadian TV show that`s made it to mid-level satellite broadcaster Living in the UK, something that didn`t hurt `CSI` or `Charmed` in their respective rises to popularity. It`s the tale of modern day Vancouver PI Vicki Nelson, a former cop who finds herself deeply embroiled in a murder with serious supernatural overtones. It`s through this she meets Henry Fitzroy, a handsome young vampire who claims to be the illegitimate son of Henry VIII. And thus, suddenly Vicki starts seeing the truth about the world of crime she previously though was committed by the hands of evil men, and how much of the credit goes to evil... things. Apparently Vancouver is crawling with all sort of supernatural nasties.

Based on a series of novels by Tania Huff, `Blood Ties: The Complete First Season` comes to UK DVD courtesy of Contender Home Entertainment, they of the once mighty HKL label.

Video

This first season of `Blood Ties` on DVD is presented - disappointingly - letterboxed, preserving the original television standard aspect ratio of 1.78:1. With the loss of resolution that an anamorphic transfer brings, not to mention the 22 episodes being spread across only 5 discs, there are noticeable drops in quality in terms of background and close-up detail, where colours tend to bleed together, you can pick out several pixelated areas and there`s a plenty of smearing during panning or tracking shots. Blacks tend to be a little murky, leaning towards grey and the obligatory speckle effect of noise does little to harden what is a relatively soft transfer. Saying that, this is clearly being churned out as something of a budget disc, and it`s perfectly watchable zoomed, at a reasonable viewing distance.

Oh Contender, how the mighty have fallen.

Audio

Bog standard Dolby Digital 2.0, and not a subtitle in sight. This is broadcast quality stuff, clear and perfectly formed. It sounds fine decoded through Pro-Logic II, with no loss of quality through steering, but obviously it`s not a patch on a proper, well produced 5.1 surround track.

Features

Nothing.

Conclusion

Comparison is the weakest form of critique - I should know, I do it all the time. But how can you avoid sizing up a new vampire show to the queen of vampire shows, namely the mighty Buffster and the gang. Well, you can`t. `Buffy The Vampire Slayer` changed the face of hip, young television and will still stand up thirty years from now. `Blood Ties` would be lucky to be on its feet next week. Because it`s old. It was old when it was conceived, it was old when it was first broadcast and it`s old on DVD. It`s got more in common with Aaron Spelling`s duff night-time vamp-soap `Kindred: The Embraced`, fully of horrible performances, flimsy plots and embarrassing scripting. It isn`t even worthy of licking the scabs of previous Canadian-produced bloodsucker crime drama `Forever Knight`, and that was a mediocre show at the best of times.

Not only didn`t `Blood Ties` impress me in the slightest, I actually found it something of a chore to watch. It`s too derivative, too straight down the middle and rides one too many clichés out of the stable. When during (enduring) one episode a series of murder locations plot out the shape of a pentagram on a map, I almost fell off my sofa. For all the wrong reasons. It`s Anne Rice-lite forcefully squeezed into a dull PI show, adding nothing new to the vampire mythos, but churning out those platitudes to the point of cringing. There`s no depth to its mostly monster-of-the-week scripting, and the few neat touches presumably lifted from the books - namely Henry`s profession as a graphic novelist and Vicki`s degenerative eye disease, seem like flawed attempts to spice up some boring characters for the screen.

`Blood Ties` is incredibly undemanding television, seemingly aiming for a more estrogen-charged audience, especially with it`s attempts to appear sexy through the intimate friction between the leads. But you could cut the sexual tension between actors Christina Cox and Kyle Schmid with a limp sausage. Throw in some of the most offensive bargain bucket effects you`ll ever see and ugly touches of heavy-handed post-modernism, and you`ve got a show that might`ve gone down a storm 20 years ago, before `The X-Files`, before `Buffy`, before `24`, before `The Sopranos` and before anyone knew any better.