Bull

I love Hollywood interpretations of the Street. Everyone is fit, athletic, superficial, and uni-dimensional.

While the 1987 Oliver Stone was brilliant in its portrayal of egos and empires, this paltry series offers nothing in terms of equivalent intelligence, depth, or even style. The business concepts aren't even right. Investment bankers and venture capitalists finance deals; brokers and traders trade stock.

After a quite promising opening 5 minutes where veteran actor Donald Moffat was addressing his army of bankers, the show quickly descended into the predictable depths of illicit affairs, illegal deals, and betrayal. Hardly original.

That aside, I'm sure that won't stop people from flocking to this Melrose Place by Battery Park. It's glitzy, but I just wish the producers would have invested a little more effort in scripts and character development.

By the way, as of this year Wall Street has gone business casual. The dark pin-striped days are over. That's why I had to mothball wardrobe of suits.

"Bull" follows the professional and private lives of a group of Wall Street stock-brokers.

Robert Roberts III (nicknamed "Ditto", for obvious reasons) leads a revolt from his grandfathers firm to start up his own firm, HSD Capital. But things may not be as easy as they first thought.

I found myself getting really engrossed by the characters lives and the story-lines. The acting is well done, you learn a lot about the back-story and family lives of the main six, and I like the fast paced dialogue.

I think the theme music is good and is quite distinctive. Also, the show's score will be familiar to fans of 'The X-Files' and "Millennium' etc, as Mark Snow is responsible for Bull's music. I also love the scene dividers, which are beautiful shots of New York in fast motion.

I don't really have a favourite character, as they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Carson "Rookie" Boyd is very interesting, as he supports his wife and baby, and sometimes they affect his judgements. Martin Decker is an odd guy! The scenes with his wife and son are amazing. His son is obsessed with his father's job and will probably be a stockbroker as well. Martin's wife keeps him grounded by offering sane advice whenever he is cooking up an insane plan. And the scenes with Marissa and her family are heartfelt and meaningful. It was a nice surprise to see Ryan O'Neal from 'Barry Lyndon' and in the last episode Tippi Hedren, 'The Birds', makes an appearance.

With the events of September 11, 2001, I was interested to see how this affected the show and how the writers handled it. But it was axed before it had the chance to tackle this issue.

I'm very disappointed to find this show was axed after such a short time. Bull is an intelligent, engrossing and witty program, and you don't need to be a business freak to understand it (though, if you have absolutely no idea about business your patience might be tested.)

What's up with the lighting on this show? I never notice these kinds of things, but I could not help noticing that in several scenes of the show one character's face was half lost in shadow, while another character's balding head was hit by a spotlight(?) which created this blinding reflection. Very distracting.

This series was shown in Sweden in 2001, and if I understand the IMDb info correctly, it only had one season. That is a pity. Was it an inability to show what life on Wall Street is like after September 11th that led to the decision to drop it?

The episodes were very interesting and entertaining to watch. The dialogue was intelligent and witty, the actors well chosen, the story captivating and moving, the music fabulous!, and it had problems to solve of both ethical and professional dimensions. I'm so very sorry that the series were not continued!

At first I thought this would be one of those series about the boom in IT-stock, and that it, in part thanks to that, would be real bad. But, they really managed to keep it real interesting during the whole series.

At first it is real focused upon stock and work, but the longer into the series you get, the more it is about the peoples own problems and issues.

A real good series, watch it!!