'New Tricks,' Season 12 - TV Review

"New Tricks" Season 12 showed up on the shelf at the library recently. See last year's review of Seasons 10 and 11 for the premise of the series. If you're not familiar with the series, forget my reviews and go watch Season 1: that's some of the best cop TV out there.

The first two episodes are essentially one two hour episode, with Jerry Standing (Dennis Waterman) finding himself knowing far too much about a corpse found under a house - a long dead policeman who used to be his boss. This eases him out of the series at the end of the second episode, to be replaced by new ex-copper Ted Case (Larry Lamb) who was introduced in the first two episodes. Standing's departure was overdue, as noted in my previous entry. The problem is ... the new characters can't be like the old characters, and they created such distinctive and good characters on the first try that the new ones can't live up to it - not that they're bad by any means. And the series, to my surprise, still remains interesting enough to watch - although not so good as the first two seasons. The biggest surprise came at the end: I'm sure there's gossip online to be read if you want to, but I was unaware that UCOS was disbanded and the series ended at the end of the season. Not a great loss after 12 seasons (even a bit late), but a little sad to see it go.