Truthfully, I really, really like this series, but have some problems with it.
If I had to choose between this and Moonbase 3, I would have to say that I would select the latter as the better show.
I think the one drawback for me is largely the dialogue and the pitch of a lot of the performances. Everybody seems to be sniping at each other a lot of the time with hard-boiled soundbites and dialogue that seems a little to self aware of how smart it is, as if Chris Boucher is afraid to have a gentle scene between his characters. That kind of worked on Blake's 7, where nobody got on anyway, but these people are supposed to be working together.
David Calder as Nathan Spring is excellent, of course, but the actors around him, less so. I do concur with the usual highlighting of Erik Ray Evans as the actor who leans on his lines the most. He seems to spend most of the time talking AT people rather than to them - and at an unnecessarily high volume.
Colin Devis is a good character though and is well played. Pal Kenzie is good too. I just feel that the cast, with the exception of David Calder, needed to calm down a bit and play their roles with the naturalism that he did.
I think that Boucher's dialogue does not help their cause. Most everybody speaks in the same world weary way, talking in sage soundbites that - while intelligent - make these people less human beings and more actors speaking intelligent dialogue. I think it detracts from them as believable characters.
The theme tune/song, I feel, could have been dumped in favour of a more Blake/Moonbase 3 style of opening music.
I also think that they should have never bothered trying to keep doing scenes of weightlessness and should have fallen back on the old artificial gravity thing, and concentrated on other aspects of the show. The nadir of this business is the old hair gelled up on their heads scene.
When I first saw the show, I felt that box was a more polite rip off of Orac. Chris Boucher has said that when it spoke it should have been audio-wise as if David Calder talking to himself, volume and tone wise, so that you were sometimes unsure which one was speaking, instead of the obvious "voice in a box" audio that we get, where we can completely tell them apart.
All those negatives of mine out of the way, despite all of that I - perhaps surprisingly - really genuinely like the show and often put it on the dvd player and felt it had great potential. I just feel it needed more sympathetic production, more of a mix of character types to balance out the weight of cynical, smart talking characters and the majority of the actors needed to consider using more subtlety in their performances.
In terms of the premise of STAR COPS, the opening episode sets the show up nicely.
Ultimately the early strangulation of the show by those sci-fi hating suits is extremely sad. The potential was there for a really solid show.
