Rookie Blue – Season 1

Posted May 25, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

In Rookie Blue we follow five rookie cops who’ve just graduated from the police academy and set their first steps in the real world of police work.

Andy McNally follows in the footsteps of her dad who left the force and has serious drinking issues. Traci Nash tries to combine her job as a cop with having a kid. Chris Diaz wants to be the best cop he can be, but only if it can be done by the book. Gail Peck has the difficult task of making people forget her family is present in the higher echelons of the force. Finally there’s Dov Epstein who seems to think he’s playing in some sort of action movie.

These five quickly learn that there’s a big difference between police academy and the streets.

Sound and Vision:
The image and sound of the series is pretty good with no notable issues. We didn’t spot any annoying compression errors and although the blacks can crunch at times, this seems more of a deliberate thing than a technical flaw.

The soundtrack uses plenty of modern music and has crystal clear dialogues, but doesn’t really do much more with the surrounds. Overall Rookie Blue gets a pretty standard – though not bad – transfer to Blu-ray that’s in line with other recent titles.

Extras:
– Making Of
– The Stryker Report: Behind the Scenes
– Season 1 trailer
– Season 2 on set teaser

Conclusion:
We checked out the first season of Rookie Blue – which is supposed to be a hit series – and weren’t impressed at all.

The first episodes show off the characters as serious dumbnuts who can’t even manage to handle their car radio (what did they learn at the academy?) and the stories behind the rookies isn’t really that interesting either. At no moment did we get any attachment or interest for any of the newly assigned cops, except for maybe Epstein but from the five he also gets the least attention. The series clearly wants to run on drama and romance and fails miserably in creating anything close to realism. Of course, I don’t live in the US but I can’t imagine cops over there are really that stupid.

The individual episodes also don’t manage to deliver interesting plots and very often the “story of the day” ends way before the episode, making plenty of time needs to be filled with music and images that don’t add anything to the show.

Rookie Blue may be a hit series somewhere, but then probably only for people who want to have some mindless show that doesn’t manage to get above average on any level and doesn’t allow for any thinking as that would only make you get turned off.

Adjustment Bureau, The Sucker Punch – Extended Cut