Here I go again, raving about another new British TV DVD release from Acorn Media. I'm getting tired of listening to myself blather on enthusiastically, frankly, so I'm gonna start with the bad stuff.

No. 1: The "interviews" with stars Martin Shaw and Lee Ingleby and creator Peter Flannery on disc one of George Gently: Series 1 are text! Like something from a magazine, and not at all like something you'd expect to find on a DVD. Very disappointing; I always love actually, you know, seeing and hearing actors talk about their work, particularly when the work in question is a modern adaptation of a period piece like this -- 2007 and 2008 productions of stories set in the early 1960s. (I want to see how cute Lee Ingleby is in a T-shirt and jeans, contrasted with the skinny Beatles suits he wears on the show. I don't think that's too much to ask.)

No. 2, and honestly, I'm at a complete loss to figure out how this happened -- it must have been a simple, if ridiculous, oversight that someone got (mildly) reprimanded for. There's no indication, either on the slipcase, on any of the slimcases for the three discs, or on the physical discs themselves, of which order these stories go in! Once you pop the discs in your player, you can see on the menus which is "Disc 1," "Disc 2" and "Disc 3," but it's very annoying -- as I can assure you from firsthand experience -- to put one in only to discover it's not the one you want. Now, sure, you've got me to tell you that this is the order you should watch them in:

1) "Gently Go Man"
2) "The Burning Man"
3) "Bomber's Moon"

But you shouldn't need me to tell you that.

Now I'll start with the adoring drivel.

Once again, the BBC has done a cop thingie right. Based on novels by Alan Hunter (the first of which was published in 1955), these are the stories of senior London Metropolitan Police investigator George Gently (Martin Shaw). Weary with grief after the death of his beloved wife -- and exhausted from a career fighting corruption in the Met at every turn -- he sidesteps the retirement he was ready to settle into when he is sent to look into one final case in rural Northumbria ... and decides to stay on, to fight different kinds of corruption and mold his new, young partner, John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) into a decent cop.

And so we have tales about, in "Gently Go Man," the murder of a member of a motorcycle gang and the small-town secrets that Gently's unraveling of it uncovers; in "The Burning Man," the death of a man who may be an active political terrorist with the Irish Republican Army, and Gently's butting heads with a cop from Special Branch with whom our weary hero has a past; and in "Bomber's Moon," the killing of a former German prisoner of war, returning to visit the local farm family with whom he had been billetted, which reveals all sorts of bigotry still lingering from the war.

These are smart, serious tales told with as much lean style as Bacchus's skinny Beatles suits and sleek sports car, and they're suprisingly modern as well. "Gently Go Man," in particular, resonates with an undertone of tolerance for homosexuality that I would have been astonished to find in the novel it's based on. That would have been something worth hearing about from series creator Flannery on a commentary track. He does "say," though, in that text interview, that what appealed to him about the novels was that "the world was on the cusp of massive social change" at the time the stories are set, "and George Gently's values were being challenged by that change." That aspect is a strong element of the three 90-minute movies here, and it's the aspect that makes the series most appealing. All those "bad" features of the DVD set aside, of course.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
film reviews and TV blogging at FlickFilosopher.com

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