Vexed: Series 1

This comic crime series from Britain opens with what appears to be a bantering couple (Lucy Punch and Toby Stephens) getting a tour of a hot apartment rental. “I'll take it,” she says, snapping it up before returning to the job at hand: namely, a corpse bleeding all over the living room rug. And that pretty much sets the tone for this series: a black comedy with cheeky attitude about self-absorbed cops with a dubious commitment to actual detective work. Punch and Stephens are DIs Kate Bishop and Jack Armstrong, new partners whose chatter veers into bickering and reveals a complete lack of chemistry—not to mention, at times, competence. He's sloppy and distracted, with a lackadaisical approach to procedure, while she's focused and professional on the job but her personal life is a mess (her marriage falls apart after she kneecaps her husband over a misunderstanding). Taking an irreverent approach to the British police procedural, Vexed spoofs buddy cop shows and murder mysteries, but while it can be funny, the show is also broad and insistently silly, more of a stunt than a fully developed satire (British critics hammered it). Compiling three episodes from 2010's debut season, extras include a photo gallery. Optional. (S. Axmaker)