Any real criminal would shove that fat Worzel Gummidge lookalike over a cliff at the first opportunity!! Cheap & trashy crime series with a terrible actress playing the lead role.....A lot like the Tory government

DCI Vera Stanhope and her various supporting characters reach out and grab you. There's no way to express the raw emotions that we feel when we watch each and every episode. From Season 1 through Season 5 we've held on waiting for the next season to show up, watching the episodes from first to last over and over again. There is always something new to notice, another detail to pick up. The brooding landscape feeds the story and the story feeds the landscape in a cycle that somehow makes the moors and the chill countryside part and parcel of each other. Led by the incomparable Brenda Blethyn the cast is superb and the characters are impeccably played. We are now starting to watch Season 6 and yet dreading seeing the last episode of this batch, knowing it will be another year before we see the next. Here in the United States, where good TV programming is hard to find, Vera shows up as the best British TV has to offer, for which we are decidedly grateful.

I'll make this review short, English not being my native language.This is a very very good crime TV series of the following reasons: * always an intriguing and interesting plot, that keep the suspense up all along.* The characters are credible, and you get to know their personal challenges too.* Blenda Blethyn really gives life too the main character, With conviction. She really is an outstanding actress, and gives life to Vera in a way that we really feel for her, and her lonely personal life.* The only negative I can think of is the departure of her co-star David Leon. They really were a good match, and I miss his presence in the latest series.

Gloomy, shiveringly depressing, "Vera" is beautifully filmed with impressive production values, in low monotones to set a consistent mood. The plots are weirdly desperate, the music lugubrious, and the resolutions formulaic.Critical actors (victims, v.-to-be, suspects etc.) crank their performances to the max emote early on, with nowhere to go. Wiser direction could control this but it happens so regularly it feels intentional. Meanwhile, Vera straggles around the darkly filmed landscape of Yorkshire, with no apparent awareness of basic police protocol (like back up when you're entering a problematic isolated house of a potentially dangerous suspect) and chews the scenery regularly at crisis points, i.e. she freaks out over discovering her sergeant concussed at the bottom of basement stairs while the incarcerated victim seems perfectly calm. Vera doesn't reach for her mobile but babbles uncontrollably slapping Joe around. Hum.I'd call this terribly unprofessional (as an actor AND as her character's status). But wait. She is supposed to be damaged right? Do we forgive this as fiction? Artistic license? Naive assumptions? One wonders: this woman's a walking/stumbling disaster of a burnout case if her out of control emotions are anything to go by. More generous reviewers call her character interpretation "passionate". Only in film I guess. Despite its ambitions, this series ironically has the grime but lacks realistic "realism". Vera's example? I'd call it nightmare leadership and I don't find it particularly entertaining.Too vividly it reminds me of the scarier classic menopause symptoms I've had to deal with in professional life. Were I on her policing 'team', or forced into any association, I'd seriously be steering clear of her at all times. As I will the rest of the series.