Wire In The Blood - The Complete Fourth Season DVD Review

In watching Wire in the Blood: The Complete Fourth Season, I have come to realize how much American and British entertainment owes to the film Silence of the Lambs. If Jonathan Demme’s award-winning 1991 psychological thriller didn’t exist, we probably wouldn’t have any of the various incarnations of CSI that populate the airwaves, nor would we have the vast number of murder mystery films that come out every year, and lastly we wouldn’t have Wire in the Blood, the show in question for this review. Granted, one could make the argument that Silence of the Lambs didn’t start the genre. After all, you could trace the lineage of the psychological murder mystery all the way back to Fritz Lang’s M, but Silence of the Lambs is clearly the leading inspiration for many of the aforementioned entertainments. This isn’t a bad thing by any means though. After all, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, right?

Wire in the Blood is a show on British television that follows in the footsteps of Silence of the Lambs, but it proves to be an engrossing piece of television entertainment in its own right. The basis of the show is what you’d expect: an investigative unit solves murder mysteries revolving around messed up people doing messed up things. The twist that keeps Wire in the Blood from being another CSI clone is that the protagonist is a psychiatric investigator who also happens to be psychic. Oh wait, that’s already been done too, hasn’t it? Alright, so it’s hard to be original in today’s television world, but Wire in the Blood is still extremely entertaining nonetheless.

The first thing that struck me when diving into Wire in the Blood: The Complete Fourth Season was that there are only four episodes in the set. “Four episodes?!” you might ask. Sounds like a bit of a rip-off, right? After all, I know DVD companies have been splitting seasons in half as of late, but four episodes for one DVD release seems a bit ridiculous. Then I realized I had jumped to conclusions a bit hastily. It seems that each episode of Wire in the Blood is actually an hour and a half long film. Each episode was presumably played in two parts on television and has been restored to its feature length running time on the DVD. As presented on this 4-disc DVD set, each episode gets its own disc. Admittedly, when you do the math that still only adds up to eight proper television episodes, which is still a bit slim considering an average television season usually consists of 22 episodes, but the feature film quality of each episode helps even things out a bit. And rest assured that this isn’t a marketing stunt, as the DVD set does indeed contain the entire fourth season, however short it may seem.

As previously mentioned, the show involves a crack team of investigators who set out to solve a variety of murder mysteries. The mysteries themselves are often rather dense, but still easy enough to follow most of the time. The strength of the episodes is aided greatly by their extended hour and a half running time, which allows the stories to be more in depth and detailed than television might normally allow. The common mantra in television is usually “get in as quick as you can and get out as quick as you can,” meaning that the creators rarely have time to slow down due to the short running time. Thanks to Wire in the Blood’s feature length episodes there are many more character moments and suspense build-ups than one would normally expect in this type of television show.

Wire in the Blood also greatly benefits from its British origins. Censors are a lot less stringent in Europe and have a different ratings system than we do, and as such, they’re allowed to show a lot more on television than we are here in America. Because of this, Wire in the Blood is able to embrace its mature subject matter to the fullest, which means including many things you would never see on American television, namely violence/gore, nudity, and strong language. This makes the show a distinctly pure example of murder mystery television because the creators don’t have to censor themselves, and the show is all the better for it.

The other unique element that I love about Wire in the Blood is its protagonist, Dr. Tony Hill. Whereas these types of shows usually feature a charming tough guy protagonist, Dr. Tony Hill is a bit of a bumbling eccentric. His psychic intuitions aren’t always crystal clear, and oftentimes they leave him with more questions than answers, but they’re a tool nonetheless. However, because of the unreliability of his visions he tends to come off as wishy-washy. This means that rather than being everyone’s number one man, he’s the guy that nobody wants on the team because they think he’s just full of crackpot theories. More often than not his theories lead to the mystery being solved and the rest of the crew growing to like him, but his unique persona is a welcome change in the leading-man category.

Moving on to the one thing that I didn’t like about my viewing experience was the complete lack of extras. Alright, there are a couple trailers for the other seasons of the show, but that’s it. This is especially regrettable considering that the previous DVD sets had extras, even if they were slim in number. I expect DVD companies to improve their offerings as they continue to release more seasons, not scrap what little material is already there. Oh well, at least the show’s good.

When you get right down to it, Wire in the Blood may not be all that original, but in this case I don’t think it really matters. Originality is only a small part of the pie when it comes to television entertainment. What it really comes down to is how well the creators utilize the subject matter, and Wire in the Blood is an extremely entertaining and suspenseful entry in the genre. It may traverse well known territory, but it knows the path well, and is guaranteed to take you on an engrossing journey.