That's the only explanation I can find for such a lifeless performance. Teresa Palmer's vocal performance is lifeless. Her physical performance is lifeless. Her facial expression is lifeless. The only thing Palmer seems capable of doing is filling her eyes with tears. Which she does. A lot. Quite a lot. And yet there is no emotion behind the tears. I can almost hear the mechanical clicking in her brain of, "This is the cue for the tears." The same with her first dinner with Matthew. When she runs her hands up his chest, it was so perfunctory. "Now, I'm supposed to touch his chest because that's what the script says." She goes through the motions, but is physically lifeless. No tension or emotion in her body at all.

I went into this series knowing nothing about the story, but I was really looking forward to something interesting. Sadly, that's not what I saw on the screen. For a character that should be so dymanic and interesting, Palmer is extremely wooden. The script doesn't help much, with inconsistencies and plainly stupid behavior, but a better actor could work with it. The pacing is very slow. We have lots of characters thrown at us in the first three episodes, but in terms of plot it was three hours of angst about whether or not to re-check a book out of the library.

Matthew Goode and Alex Kingston are wasted in this series. The only performer with any spark is Elarica Johnson, who, when her character is leaving Venice for England, manages to convey more energy and emotion and depth in one wordless scene than Palmer had done in three episodes with dialogue. What a shame Johnson wasn't cast as the lead. I think it would have been a much better show, even with the shoddy scripts.

Oxford looks beautiful, if a bit too steeped in sepia tones. Since it's a show about magic and creatures, by the third episode I kept hoping that a resurrected John Thaw as Inspector Morse would show up and resolve everything in a few hours to get things moving along. I'm disappointed and won't bother to finish out the first series as it feels like it would be a frustrating waste of time.