Campbell’s extensive acting skills and personal “bad boy” appeal led Da Vinci the energy and competence the role requires. in his signature raincoat, he fits the show’s local setting, Vancouver, which is depicted as rainy and drab yet alive with a street culture of transient and marginal features. His investigations are marked by his candid and incisive observations and procedures as investigative coroner with a mission. A plain talker and recovered alcoholic, he has experienced loss (his father’s death, divorce, and an inability to overcome alcoholism). Obsessive in his concern with injustices and lapses in the Social Service system, Da Vinci has an amiable rapport with his ex-wife (Gwynyth Walsh), chief pathologist in the coroner’s office, and is a worthy dad to his teenage daughter.

Typically, Da Vinci is on the move, carrying the minimal tools of his trade to crime scenes: a brief case or shoulder tote containing camera and rubber gloves, a cell phone, and often a file truck under one arm. He thinks out loud as he reviews and debates the circumstances of the death in question with cops and colleagues on the scene. He is interested in the truth of the matter but also forgoes protocol to follow his instincts; as a colleague reminds him of his iconoclastic snooping, “Isn’t this a little beyond the coroner’s mandate?” In an episode featuring a seemingly open-and-shut case of teen suicide, he rightly suspects the family doctor of malpractice that resulted in the youth’s death. By badgering the doctor on his rounds and earning the mother’s trust, Da Vinci figures out that similar medical negligence was the cause of the youth’s father’s death a month earlier.

Da Vinci is a sociable loner with collegial links to all the show’s continuing characters. Unlike Da Vinci, the continuing characters have a professional or personal counterpart. Mick (Ian Tracey), the younger detective, and Leo (Donnelly Rhodes), who is nearing retirement, work as an investigative team. Leo is an “old-school” thinker, with a homophobic streak, and is burdened with his wife’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease. The two women pathologists, Da Vinci’s ex-wife and a younger woman (Suleka Mathew) of East Indian heritage, are independent women and compatible professionals. The younger woman has had a fitful intimate relationship with Mick. Mick’s brother Danny is rehabilitating himself from shady drifter to undercover operative “Bobby.” On the right side of the law, Danny regains his brother’s respect while he strives to revive the affection of the smart, if sometimes unethical, detective Angie (Venus Terzo). In a recent episode, Danny confronts Angie for her deceitful plot with a woman implicated in murder. Angie leads the woman to believe that a witness protection program might be forthcoming in exchange for testimony against the husband.

Da Vinci’s Inquest thrives on exceptional writing and nuanced performances and camera work. The well-crafted narratives and ensemble characters are located in Vancouver's street life with its ethnic and racial mix of Asians, East Indians, Blacks, aboriginals, and recent immigrants. In a CBC interview, Campbel lauded the show's intelligent camerawork: "It feels so real to the audience and yet has this loving touch to it... because of David Fraze's [director of photography] eye." The concluding scene of an episode near the end of the 2001-02 season, for example, is a tour de force of camera work that meshes characters and local setting. Within several city blocks, the camera captures a series of rambling conversations. Da Vinci emerges from an alleyway, and a teen contact catches up with him. The teen retreats, then a detective emerges from a tackle shop, extolling the art of "catch and release" fly-fishing. At the next alleyway, detectives Mick and Leo bump into the two men, and the foursome continues to stroll and discuss fishing and an unresolved immigration case. Through five minutes of continuous camera work, without editing, an aesthetic integrity more common to observational documentary than television is constructed.

Vancouver is as individuated as cityscape in Da Vinci’s Inquest as Baltimore was in Homicide: Life on the Street. Familiar streets, skyline, docks, and dull weather shape the show’s urban textures, with realist narrative glimpses of Vancouver’s immigrant heritage, bag ladies, marginal citizens and junkies.

Episodes are richly structured with dovetailing plots. Social issues and philosophical debates are injected into running conversations. One episode has Da Vinci debating, with a young female police officer, the negative effects of installing surveillance cameras to control local street crime. He recalls Galileo’s suspicion of new technology (“Every technological advancement is greeted by a howl of horror”) and argues for human vigilance over technical surveillance. Episodes rarely offer pat conclusions, even when cases are solved. In an episode featuring a jailed teenager whose baby dies, DaVinci concludes that he doesn’t “believe anybody” — not the girl, the prison guards, or the medical team. Nor does he perceive a cover-up conspiracy; rather systemic failure and lacking communication by all parties are the culprits.

As realist drama, Da Vinci’s Inquest has addressed the disappearance and unsolved murders of numerous Vancouver prostitutes. It has alluded to the maltreatment of “very young aboriginal women” who, some twenty years ago, were given tubal ligations by a now elderly doctor. As DaVinci’s ex-wife reports to him, the doctor’s “selective amnesia” makes it impossible to investigate this injustice. Such stories are known to observers of Canadian social history. Da Vinci’s Inquest keeps them visible within television drama.