3 out of 5

Created by: Tim Kilby and Shelley Eriksen

covers season 1

Let’s not knock the buddy-cop dynamic, shall we?  It is, most certainly, one of TV’s fallback formulas, racked up there next to sexual tension between your leads, often expressed as bickering.  Ah – does Private Eyes adopt this trope as well?  Sure, why not.  Originality is not exactly what the show is going for.  But fallback formula shows are never going for originality; generally, it’s more about the chemistry between characters, or the entertainable leveraging of its premise.  Get these parts down and chances are, you can have a following.  Nail them, and you’re Bones, boldly going ten plus seasons and earning your audience’s trust enough to fiddle with that golden Moonlighting-rule of “…but don’t actually have your leads hook up!”

Well, we’re only one season deep, and there’s certainly some joke about Canada to be made – Private Eyes being a proud Canadian production – but those key important elements are there, and a further check in the show’s plus category is that the writers choose to face front with the tropes, calling them out, which makes it a lot more fun and organic when cute looks are exchanged, or the bickering begins.

Matt Shade – Priestly – is a former hockey player, basking in his past celebrity and trying to keep a business going as a rep for young hockey talent.  His past mistakes – career, family – seem to haunt and hinder this pursuit, though his current single-parent of legally blind child Jules (Jordyn Negri) is going well, against all odds.  A tragic doping scandal with his current client causes him to cross paths with Angie Everett (Cindy Sampson), a PI trying to nail who she believes to be the source of the drugs.  You see the buddy cop strands forming, yes?

Indeed, soon enough, the two are butting heads over the investigation, each with their own motives and methods – Matt leveraging his connections, Angie using her, y’know, actual PI experience – and with the case solved (spoiler?) between the two of them, Matt is brought to question his chosen profession, and Angie can’t deny his instincts.  The partnership is born; we have our serializable concept.

But Private Eyes remains humble in its approach: It doesn’t go out of its way to involve sports-themed cases – Matt’s celebrity just, again, serves as a convenient way in to certain conversations or as a needed distraction – and the bickering is more playful than contextual, as Angie fully admits that Shade is pretty good at this, he just needs to learn the ropes.  The show even confesses to its romantic angle, and sets Angie up with a (as far as we know for now) truly good guy while Matt’s family rags on him for just going after whatever girl is closest to him.

The family dynamic works especially well.  Father and daughter work as expected sources of wisdom, but it comes across honestly, and Jules’ blindness is akin to RJ Mitte’s handicap in Breaking Bad: It just seems like something the character happens to have, as opposed to some subplot wedged in there.

So that’s… Not a lot of negatives, right?  Right you are, and thanks for reading!  Private Eyes is an entirely enjoyable show, for all the right character and plotting reasons.  But it will forever be a generic formula show, with entertaining mysteries that you can easily suss your way through but don’t mind watching the cast do the same, and there’s nothing much deeper than that going on.  Which is fine.  In the wacky world of ratings, a solid three star – something you know you can recommend for fans of x, y or z – is sometimes a lot more worth your time than the four or five star niche affair.