Why so much hype?

Redundant and unnecessary.

Best movie of this year hands down!

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

In many respects, a landmark TV series - changing the image of police as seen on TV, changes in real policing (from bobby-on-the-beat to patrol cars), bringing serious social problems to the screen for the first time - this series captured a time and place with clarity, making these episodes a very valuable treasure - I hope they haven't been dumped or let rot somewhere! The series was also valuable in the opportunities it gave many brilliant writers to develop their skills.The show succeeded in its two goals, exciting police action drama, and gritty social drama (with just a drop of humour when needed); the best of the police action thread followed Barlow (played by Stratford Johns) into the spin-off series Softly, Softly - Task Force, and later: Barlow at Large. Unforgettable music. The forgettable bit was why the car numbers all started Z - V; I think Zed (not Zee; this was British) was for (Ford) Zephyr.(With apologies to Toody and Muldoon) I wonder: Zed Victor One, where are you, now? I suspect few episodes survive.

This was ground-breaking TV. I only realized this later living in North America and seeing a "new wave" of crime shows post Starsky & Hutch and Miami Vice. Shows like Law and Order, CSI and The Wire are great programs but Z Cars was created thirty years before them and got people wanting a more gritty cop show. Growing up outside of Belfast, I was also drawn to it as it had an Ulster actor in the cast. At a time when Irish actors were only allowed to play drunken thugs and terrorists, it was great to see one play a good guy. Sadly it was unique in that respect and Irish characters/actors were still largely banned to those roles for the next twenty years.

When I was a lad in the far-off days of 405-line black-and-white TV, Z-Cars was required viewing, the more so as most of the characters spoke with the same accent as my mothers' cousins whom we regularly visited on Sundays in Birkenhead every few months (though our accent was /very/ Welsh!).I remember that a boy who travelled on my school bus got cast as a 15-year-old tearaway in one episode in around 1973. I don't think he had much of an acting career afterwards (he's not on the IMDb, anyway!), but I did see a photo of him in Sgt Lynch's clutches in the local paper afterwards.

As an American who spent part of his childhood in England in the early 70's, I distinctly remember this show being a real snoozer, especially when compared to the much better American cop shows of the time (Hawaii Five O, Ironsides, etc.) For whatever reason, Brits just have never been much good at making crime and crime fighting interesting, whether on TV or the big screen, after all, I recently rented the DVD "Lock, Stock, & Two Smoking Barrels" and it sucked, mostly a lame rip-off of the far superior "Pulp Fiction". Maybe the problem is that we Americans just have much better criminals, more ruthless, greedy, and inventive and, as a result, American cops have to be much better as well to catch them, it sounds goofy but it's about the only theory I can think of that makes sense .......