I just finished it. It's biggest problem, and what probably chased away the networks, it that to maintain the level of special effects to make this world look viable would take a huge budget.
That's probably true. They would've had to dial back on the exteriors and street scenes a lot, although some shows do just that as they go on -- spend a lot on the scenery FX up front to establish the world, then cut down on them as the season goes on and spend more time indoors once it's established well enough that the audience can take it as read (I think
Caprica pretty much did that). Still, you've also got all these routine FX like the big flame and the Stream terminals in the squad room. And when they did do exteriors, they'd have had to make sure to remove all the background cars' steering wheels either on set or digitally, and probably any radio antennae as well.
And I don't see general audiences flocking to this series. The world portrayed is too alien from our own.
Whereas my problem with it was that it wasn't alien
enough. Despite supposedly having this profoundly different foundation and history, it looked and worked almost entirely like our world aside from some surface trappings. They still had cars, they had the equivalent of guns and cell phones and the Internet, they had the same kind of "device"-based civilization that we have with a ubiquitous means of delivering power to those devices; it's just that the details were substituted with other details. The only thing they were missing was television (as far as we saw), but most characters
on TV don't generally
watch much TV anyway, so that wasn't too great a change from normal cop dramas. So the alienness was ultimately superficial. It was clever as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. Although of course it would've been impossibly expensive to develop the concept more fully.
And I don't buy the "science and technology don't exist" premise. They obviously have science -- a science of magic, a science of forensics, a science of bioengineering, etc. They have the ability to engineer the "power plants" to give them the different effects they want -- that's technology, never mind that it's organically based. Technology doesn't mean metal and electricity, it means any practical application of knowledge to influence the physical world for human benefit. And the cops apply the same kind of analytical tools to their evidence that they would in our world, observation and deduction based on details and known patterns. That's scientific thinking. Science isn't a specific set of rules, it's the process of figuring out how the world works, of gathering evidence and drawing conclusions and predictions from it. And that's unquestionably what they were doing when they analyzed the "blood evidence" and the emanations from the sound-masking spell. So the underlying premise doesn't really make sense. This world isn't devoid of science and technology, it's just built its science and technology around a different set of physical laws.
Too bad, though, because I liked the idea of it, of an urban-fantasy cop show in an alternate world where magic ruled. It reminded me of Diane Duane's novel
Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, which also had a strong magic-cop-procedural element, as well as
Dragon Precinct and its sequels by the TrekBBS's own Keith R. A. DeCandido (though those are set in a more traditionally preindustrial fantasy world). And the cast was pretty good, though Esai Morales's interpretation of a woman-turned-man came off as a campy stereotype.
