Blood in Amsterdam

There is so much wrong with this series.

1 Each episode is too long & feels twice as long as it actually is.

2 Marc Warren is absolutely awful. I don't dislike him as an actor particularly but he's extremely badly miscast in this.

3 The mix of accents is infuriating. Make it in Dutch & subtitle it or use British actors. Having the police speaking English accented English while virtually everyone else is speaking foreign accented English is just tedious.

4 The story lines are so busy trying to be clever but they just end up boring.

5 The best thing about it is the dog.

6 Amsterdam is a nice place, an hour & a half spent on a televised slow barge journey round the canals would be an hour & a half far better spent.

The second episode again has Van der Valk in a bar and someone making eyes at him. This time the lady is interested in colleague Lucienne.

The story has a gruesome beginning. A corpse being sliced and body parts being found in the property of one of Amsterdam's richest families. The Cuypers who are in the diamond business.

The family are spoilt, know that money can buy anything but not a new heart. The matriarch of the family recently died after a heart transplant went wrong.

Van der Valk discovers that the corpse was linked to the Cuypers diamond business. He was also in a relationship with several members of the family.

There are more murders, some questions regarding the recent death of the mother and a unique diamond being stolen.

Certainly the story had an interesting set up. Unfortunately it was totally daft and made no sense. The fault lies with the writer.

There is a scene where someone in Van der Valk's team points to a map and figures out. Well the dead man could had gone in these other alternative directions. (Like the audience do not have Google maps on their smartphones!)

Then they go to a warehouse where for some random reason they find a person of interest who was hanging around.

An employee of Cuypers diamonds is dismembered, his body left purposely to be found.

After last week's bore fest, my expectations for this one were low, it was better than last week, a much more interesting storyline, but I still don't feel they it's firing on all cylinders. Considering the gruesome, macabre story, it just didn't land somehow, imagine a chopped up body being found on a show like Line of Duty or Silent Witness, it would be all guns blazing, here it was treated like a lost cat.

Some good bits here, I liked Joe's character development, and I thought Marc Warren have his most assured performance to date, I'm still not fully sold on him, but this was definitely better.

Thomas Cammaert was pretty good as Cornelius, I've seen him a few times, he has a real presence, and it's nice to see an actual Dutchman on the show.

The plot was a bit more Midsomer Murders than Van Der Valk I thought, but overall it was watchable, 6/10.

They can hype it up as much as they like in interviews, there's no chemistry between the two leads, and that combined with a slow pace (the adverts don't help) saps any fun out of an episode that has a twist we've seen before a million times.

But it pulls in decent viewer numbers, it ticks enough boxes - I've no doubt this will run on ITV for years.

Think of this as a dramady with incredible scenery - and that includes Marc Warren as both he and Amsterdam are equally hot on screen. When this show comes on, I am just transported with suspended belief and just enjoy the ride. You know all the main characters will survive and so even the suspenseful parts can be watched with peace. I can't wait for Series / Season 3. In this episode I was as captivated as ever and enjoyed the plot and the story. Each episode is a police procedural but more importantly it's a development (hopefully) of the relationship of the four characters (5 if you count VDV's boss). In that way think of it like NCIS; don't watch it for the crime, but instead watch it for the serial story about the main characters.