It is taking me a long time to understand the magnetic appeal that the British crime series, Vera has for me. I still remember the disappointment of watching the first episode, something I did in response to a friend’s raving enthusiasm. The show was so drab and dingy! The mother of one of the murder victims lived in a narrow street with no trees, and although she was played by Gina McKee, and another notable actress, Juliet Aubrey, also appeared in the episode, they both seemed flattened by the show’s grey atmosphere. Newcastle was a long, long, long way from Oxford, whose dreaming spires inspired so much of the sociopathic ambition of the murderers in Morse and its two satellite shows, Lewis and Endeavour. It was hard to imagine a series less glamorous than Vera. But, to my surprise, I couldn’t stop watching.

At the moment I am approaching the end of an umpteenth run through the whole series, which came to an end last year, and now totals fourteen seasons and twenty-eight CDs. To be exact, I have just watched Episode 2 of Season 11, “Recovery.” As is often, perhaps usually the case, there is nothing very attractive about the people who are caught up in its story. In this one, it’s a support worker who dies, in the middle of a national forest. The only formal irregularity is that the person responsible for her death is charged with manslaughter, not murder. Nothing particularly interesting happens in Vera Stanhope’s office, either. In the previous episode, Vera had been nagging her lieutenant, Aiden Healy, to confront his marital problems instead of sleeping in the office. This kind of human-interest interaction among the detectives is missing. What makes “Recovery” memorable is a stunning interrogation-room tirade. Every now and then in Vera, the actor playing the malefactor is called upon to deliver a truly theatrical, full-body scene. (All right, full upper-body scene, delivered from a seat at the table.) Here, Jamie Ballard, playing Duncan, an aggrieved husband, collapses into a blubbering despair that, unlike the run of these spectacles, is horribly sympathetic. One can easily imagine…

One can easily imagine being overwhelmed by the frustration that has prevented Duncan from leading an ordinary married life. His wife happens to be burdened with a troublesome sister and an angry niece. (The spouse who has never been moved to protest, “I married my partner, not my in-laws!” has been very lucky.) I am not going to argue that Duncan’s endurance has been tried more than most. That’s not the point. The point is that Ballard gives Duncan’s misery such comprehensive expression. Basically, Duncan is beset by those miserably familiar formalities of bureaucracy that seem to protect civic and corporate employees from accountability. At the key moment, he bursts out with the question that, I believe, has enraged us all in these times: How do you get through to these people? And in Duncan’s case, the bureaucrats, the social workers, have all been trained, trained, to ignore him. As a grown man, he’s presumed to be capable to taking care of himself, but he can do nothing to shield himself from the burdens of having his resilience taken for granted. Which include shame. However easy it might be to dismiss such men, in the abstract, as the victims of infringed entitlement, Jamie Ballard presents us with a vivid, actual human being — nothing abstract about him.

Watching Vera episodes the first couple of times, I was taken by the interplay of Brenda Blethyn (Vera) with her two successive lieutenants, David Leon and Kenny Doughty. Also with the five women who perform important detective roles over the length of the series, the four men who impersonate pathologists, and with Jon Morrison and Riley Jones rounding out the stock company. There is also the fantastic treat of being spared the routine interference from “upstairs” that plagues Morse and many other video detectives. Nobody ever tells Vera that she’s stepping on VIP toes, or that her budget will not cover her extraordinarily sweeping demands for detective manpower. Only toward the very end is there any suggestion that her methods might need updating; acute spoiler anxiety prevents me from identifying the traitor (and anyway the outrage proves to be momentary). The criminals and their victims, however, were all utterly ordinary people, nothing like the glittering dons and voracious wives of Inspector Morse’s world.

Over time, however, my interest shifted. My concern for these ordinary people has moved to the fore. Their catastrophes are almost always caused by a mutation of love, and often it is ignorance of a simple fact about a loved one that triggers the disaster. In “Protected” (Season 4, Episode 2), a husband fatally mistakes his wife’s long-lost son for a lover — and mumbles the almost inevitable exculpatory line, “I only wanted to talk to him.” In another, the murderer intends to strike at an all-round villain, but, mistaken about the driver of a car, kills instead the woman for whose sake he commits the crime. The wrong person dies, but intent (to kill X) plus death (of Y) still adds up to murder. These ironies are not lingered over with Shakespearean gusto. They’re just stupid mistakes, the stuff of life. More often, of course, it is rejected love that provokes murderous rage.

In many ways, the killers of Vera are sympathetic to a degree that excites our clemency: we want to pardon them, to find them innocent. But Vera is as implacable as a Greek fury or a Hebrew prophet. It is never okay, in Vera’s world, to yield to the overpowering impulse to hurt somebody else. Although she is occasionally moved to volcanic outrage, as by the abusive narcissist Simon (Daniel Ings) in “Dark Road” (Season 6, Episode 1), she is never vindictive, never smug or self-satisfied. She is simply adamant, and silently so. It is she who brings almost every tirade to an end. “You should have thought of that at the time.” Vera herself is obviously the survivor of a lot of childhood damage, but she is bent for good, not for wickedness. Blethyn pulls off the protracted stunt of drawing us into Vera’s stunted sociability without dreaming that her character would make an exception for us. We, too, would be rebuffed at Vera’s door. And yet we remain curious about Vera after Vera. Well, I do. She is not cut out of better cloth than those whom she puts behind bars. She simply has more self-respect.