DVD review: ‘George Gently - Series 1’ (Blu-ray)

He’s an oddly named London copper with a tragic past and an avuncular, plodding way of getting at the solution to a crime. And he’s shipped off to the foggy northern provinces where he’s partnered with an ambitious, quick-on-the-trigger young detective sergeant who’s brashly impatient with his boss’s old-school ways.

That’s the essential set-up for the BBC crime series “Inspector George Gently,” a cerebral police procedural that’s winning a devoted following in the U.S. and that now has a spanking new first season out on Blu-ray DVD.

“George Gently – Series 1” offers up the first three 90-minute episodes of the series that first aired on British TV in 2007-8, and it aptly sets up the series’ premise and showcases the craggy beauty of the show’s locale (supposedly set in Northumberland, the first season was actually shot along the Irish coast).

Drawn from a series of 30-plus “George Gently” crime novels by the late Alan Hunter that were published from 1955-99, the series stars veteran TV actor Martin Shaw (“Judge John Deed”) as world-weary Inspector Gently and wiry Lee Ingleby (“Nicholas Nickleby”) as Detective Sergeant John Bacchus.

“Series 1” includes the pilot and two following episodes that are set in 1964, an era when England was wracked by social unrest and roiling cultural change – when corruption and violence were rampant in both London and rural environs and racist cops were often the norm.