Due South
Cast & Key People
Our Review
Paul Haggis made the weirdest great cop show of the nineties a decade before Crash, and it is still the one his fans quote at him: Due South, about Constable Benton Fraser, an RCMP officer so formally decent he reads like a parody written by someone who has never met a Mountie, except the show plays it entirely straight and dares you not to love him. Fraser came to Chicago to solve his father’s murder and stayed, attached as liaison to the Canadian consulate, partnered to a loud Chicago detective, and permanently accompanied by Diefenbaker, a deaf white wolf who is the best actor on the payroll. Paul Gross plays Fraser with a stillness that turns every deadpan ‘yes’ into a punchline and every quiet speech about his father into a knife. IMDb 8.0 from 8.1K votes, 85% on the Tomatometer.
The magic trick is tone. A scene can be a genuine murder investigation, a fish out of water comedy about Canadian politeness as a weapons system, and a buddy picture, in the same four minutes, without winking. Fraser solves cases by noticing things and refusing to be corrupt, and the precinct around him, Beau Starr’s bellowing Lieutenant Welsh, Tony Craig’s dry Detective Huey, treats him like a weather event. The wolf solves the rest by existing.
The show is also famous for an honesty most series would hide: after three seasons, detective Ray Vecchio was played by a different actor. David Marciano left, and the show recast the role with Callum Keith Rennie, then explained the identical stranger as Ray’s cousin from Toronto who also happens to be a homicide detective named Ray. The whole cast stared at the camera and committed, and it is still one of the best running jokes any series ever made out of its own contract dispute.
Eight out of ten across 66 episodes and four seasons, including the two hour movie pilot where it all starts. Watching it in the US takes effort, streaming has drifted to Canadian shelves, Crave carries it, and American viewers keep rotating through rental purgatory, the fate of most Alliance Communications product. It is the most Canadian show ever made about Chicago, and the fact that a small, upright man with a wolf beat the entire serious cop catalog to the best buddy pairing of the decade is the whole argument for cult classics existing.