User Reviews

I'm sorry, but this was just bad.... The acting was stiff...no charisma between the actors and the guest cast ....well words elude me....I am afraid the set town was also very amateurish and the costumes a bit to underwhelming i.e. the dance hall girl no..no.. Get a new director and start again... I would like to see a GOOD western on TV it would be a welcome change to the barrage of reality ...ha-ha... Also I am sick of swearing ...have writer lost the ability of writing actual dialogue? Do make an effort to improve the show, please. I will keep watching in hope. I am sorry to be so negative but I feel that there is something to be gained from good and bad comments.

The Pinkerton Detective Agency is a body that is often mentioned in films about the old West and there are quite a lot of films that feature individual agents. However, there is very little around that deals in any depth with the history of the organisation and its operation in its early days. I really hoped that this series was going to be the exception, and was going to be in the class of Hatfields & McCoys. I was sadly disappointed. I have seldom seen anything so wooden, with that constant dreadful background music so beloved of the makers of fourth rate garbage, made on a minimal budget with actors that nobody except Canadians have ever heard of. What a pity. The subject matter has loads of potential and this effort does it no justice at all. Apparently it was made in Canada because it was too expensive to make it in the USA. With better actors, a better script and a commitment to making something like the Hatfields & McCoys the Americans would have been falling over themselves to make it.

The scenario and subject matter has lots of potential, but the plot lines and dialogue are underwritten, the actors mostly wooden (Angus MacFayden is the notable exception), and, in the early episodes the cinematography is also poor: flat lighting, quite static backgrounds always in focus (distracting and doesn't help tell the story) and looks like it was shot on CCTV cameras (in fact it was shot on the latest generation of HD/4K "pro-sumer" digital SLRs costing $2000 and probably with basic lenses rather than rented professional digital cameras with better quality and more flexible lenses with better ability to change focus within the scene.).

I did persist for a few episodes, and the later ones are a bit better all round and will pass the time but the production still could have cast better "unknown" actors in the lead roles, clearly the casting executive spent the least time possible and opted to employ actors who were presumably known to be reliable and available but just not very engaging on the small screen rather than taking a searching for new talent that could be more engaging.

I think the show is also not helped by the setting in Kansas City, Chicago or another big US city of the same period would have been more interesting visually (like Ripper Street) but probably harder and more expensive to film.