Da Vinci's Inquest

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Television series
Original title Da Vinci's Inquest
Country of production Canada
original language English
Year (s) 1997-2004
length 45 minutes
Episodes 91 in 7 seasons
idea Chris Haddock
music Schaun Tozer,
Tim McCauley
First broadcast October 7, 1998 (Canada) on CBS
occupation

Main actor:

Supporting cast:

Da Vinci's Inquest (German: Da Vinci's investigation ) is a Canadian television series about the urban coroner Dominic da Vinci as the central figure. The series produced for the English-speaking part of the Canadian broadcaster CBC was extremely successful in Canada and ran there for seven years from 1997 to the end of 2004.

content

The series is set in Vancouver and is based - freely - on true cases that the real-life chief coroner Larry Campbell had solved before he was elected mayor of Vancouver in 2002. Campbell, now a member of the Canadian Senate , also worked on some of the scripts. The main actor is the Canadian actor Nicholas Campbell , who is best known for films by David Cronenberg such as Naked Lunch (1991) and Dead Zone (1983). Developer, screenwriter - among others - and one of the directors is Chris Haddock , best known for writing several episodes of the MacGyver series .

In addition to Nicholas Campbell, the actors are almost exclusively Canadian, some of whom are internationally known. The renowned Shakespeare actress Gwynyth Walsh plays Da Vinci's ex-wife, the pathologist Patricia da Vinci (until 2002). Donnelly Rhodes , known as Doctor Cottle in Battlestar Galactica , is Detective Leon Shannon . The actor of Detective Mick Leary , Ian Tracey , often seen in smaller guest roles in American series such as The Dead Zone and Taken , was at the age of 15 through his impersonation of Huckleberry Finn in the German-Canadian television series The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1979) also known in Germany.

The series about the coroner Da Vinci was valued by critics and audiences mainly because of its complex characters, believable plots and a certain gloomy mood that differentiates it from both older, simple US series with similar themes as Quincy , as well as from the more matter-of-fact British BBC productions such as coroner Dr. Samantha Ryan . Some critics compare Da Vinci's Inquest in its design with the police officer series NYPD Blue by Steven Bochco, which was also shown in Germany . The individual episodes mostly deal with "hard" topics such as serial murder of prostitutes , pimp wars in the red light district and deaths in police custody . The creators of the series did not shy away from taboo topics such as rape in marriage and suicide of children. The crime scene is often Downtown Eastside , Vancouver's problem district with poverty, violence and drug problems .

Awards

The series won numerous awards, including six times in a row the Canadian television Gemini Award for best English-language dramatic series, leading actor Nicholas Campbell a Gemini Award for best actor in Canada. Anne Wheeler , director of several episodes, received a Leo Award , film and television award at the Leo Awards Film Festival in Vancouver in 2000 for her directorial work in the related episodes 14 and 15 ( The Cinderella Story ) (1999) .

Broadcast Notes

Da Vinci's Inquest has also been running successfully in the USA since 2005, where Penguin Books created a paperback series for the episodes, and has so far been broadcast in around 50 countries on all five continents ; it has not yet been seen in Germany.

End of series

In 2005, Da Vinci's Inquest in Canada was discontinued. The follow-up series Da Vinci's City Hall (German: Da Vincis Rathaus ), conceived after the biography of the real mayor, Larry Campbell, with Dominic Da Vinci alias Nicholas Campbell as the newly elected mayor of Vancouver and a detective Mick Leary alias Ian Tracey who has risen to city ​​coroner , was not so successful and was taken out of the program by CBC after the first annual season in February 2006.

In a conversation with the Canadian daily newspaper The Globe and Mail from Toronto on February 28, 2006, the leading actor and director expressed their opinion on the alleged reasons for the cancellation: As the city of Vancouver is intensively working on its appearance as clean and safe in preparation for the next 2010 Winter Olympics The city works and the police are currently “cleaning up” unusually rigorously in problem areas such as Downtown Eastside on the instructions of higher authorities , and series such as Da Vinci's Inquest and Da Vinci's City Hall are increasingly undesirable. Affairs publicly spread via television, such as corruption and crimes within political and bureaucratic institutions and the police, are too hot iron and bad for the image of Vancouver and all of Canada.

Main actor Campbell in particular publicly cites political reasons for the dismissal, while writer and director Haddock looks at the matter more soberly from an economic point of view: After so many years, viewers would have had enough of the coroner Da Vinci and the new role as established mayor they didn't take it from him - the audience rating slipped into the basement. The Quality of Life , a feature-length Da Vinci special for English-language Canadian television, aired in June 2008.

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