Television: 'Due South' (1994-1996) [Revised]

There were few television shows as cool as 'Due South', or as passionate in what they were trying to do. It was a Canadian buddy cop show about a 'perfect' Mountie in Chicago called Benton Fraser and his friendship with Italian American cop Ray Vecchio, which thrived on the dynamic between its two leads as they tackled various kinds of cases both personal and professional. Over the course of two years the excellent Paul Gross and David Marciano took two characters that could have been cardboard cutouts in the wrong hands and pumped so much humanity into them, with the assistance of a writing team that included Paul Haggis and David Shore, that they transcended the genre they began in. Paul Gross in particular was drenched in so much natural sincerity that he could be relied on to carry absolutely anything, while the development of the series was twinned to that of David Marciano's development as Vecchio.

So far did they move from the gag definition of 'Dudley Doright in Chicago', that Fraser evolved from an invincible moral superhero to the best perfect but flawed man with a vulnerable heart to ever get tangled up in crime, while Vecchio begins as a potentially corrupt streetwise cop and ends as a contemporary wise man who's absorbed much from his friend and supplied all the rest from his tough urban heart. To be true, it's very hard to write about the series as a whole, as the standalone episodes vary in type tremendously, and the season one mini-arc is such an emotional journey that it practically constitutes an award-winning four part mini-series all on its own. Oh, and Leslie Nielsen guest stars twice, brilliantly.

Instead of summarising an summarisable program it might be wiser to pick out some of the standout elements that recurred as series motifs. Easily the best place to begin is with the musical sequences, which lift every episode they appear in tremendously, whether they be montages or not. I honestly don't know if they were montages, whether they were encapsulating sequences of gangsters trying to track down the shoemaker and eliminate Fraser, excellent production value car or carriage chases, Vecchio confronting his star-crossed criminal soulmate, or Fraser's slum-mates renovating their building. Every montage worked, even the very early heavy rock instances.

After the montages, there is of course the wolf. Fraser had a deaf lip-reading wolf companion named Diefenbaker, uncannily intelligent, who essentially functioned as a third lead. There were actually at least two shows where Diefenbaker was the lead and performed pretty well. A wolf, played by a non-wolf called Lincoln in the grand tradition of television and film. Serving as Vecchio's wolf was the coolest car to ever feature in a television show, and I've used 'cool' now in this blog more often than in the past decade, the legendary mint green Buick Riviera from 1971. That car is so pretty that even I would consider driving just to have one.

Now we get to the banter, which essentially defines the dynamic between the two leads and the basis for some of the most rounded supporting characters to ever be found in a short-lived series. Incidental comments and speeches formed the basis for much of the character development, sometimes inspiring whole episodes later down the run of the show. The primary example, which may be a bad one as I suspect it was planned, was Fraser's monologue in 'You Must Remember This', which is paradoxically the definition of a Vecchio episodes. That monologue essentially defines and foreshadows the three-part arc that climaxes season one, the last part of which was covered earlier in the blog, and the arc that almost collapses the whole narrative of the series. This three part odyssey effectively undercuts the whole second season by being too good, but that's a whole other story, and that season succeeds in other ways.

Finally, to the music. The music was special, blending with montages to make some of the episodes iconic for those who've seen them. Many episodes in the first season featured now Canadian super singer Sarah Maclachlan and prospering in the fusion, and others cherry picked from opera, rock and contemporary folk to fit the genre of the show that week. As a note, the early episode combination of a horse and carriage chase to heavy rock was pretty brave and memorable indeed. Golly, this was a show that went places other shows didn't dare to approach. Even the cues were fascinatingly native American.

'Due South': A great series, which started roughly but built to a polish by first building up the perfect mountie, coupling him with a shakily moral police detective, breaking the aforementioned perfect mountie and then rebuilding them both better. Yes, I'm prejudiced as it was a formative show for me, but it's my blog. For forty two episodes 'Due South' was something special, and very odd.

O.

PS Yes, I know I haven't talked about the subsequent 'revival' season. Take that as a hint.