ITV once announced the comeback of Columbo by playing Mark Morrison’s Return of the Mac — a whole detective represented by a crumpled old raincoat. This weekend, a similarly feted piece of clothing returns to our screens — along with the sleuth who inhabits it — as Danish detective Sarah Lund reappears in the iconic Faroese jumper for series two of The Killing (Forbrydelsen), starting Saturday on BBC4.
I should state at this point that this is in no way going to be an objective piece of writing. I write as an unashamed fan. I absolutely loved the first series of The Killing, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the second. As luck would have it, I’m away in Copenhagen (pretending to stalk Troels Hartmann in the town hall) this weekend, but I’ll make sure I catch up during the week.
What’s so great about this latest piece of Scandi Crime fiction? Are we just interested in our Nordic cousins meandering around because it seems foreign and cerebral to us; a notch up from Midsomer Murders or the standard detective shows on our major channels? As someone once said to me, there are probably Scandinavians sitting down to a subtitled episode of New Tricks, marvelling at Dennis Waterman’s subtle characterisation and the psychological pacing of the drama. But I think it goes beyond that: the Scandi shows like Wallander and The Killing hark back to a more exciting, more artful age of crime drama.
Look back at an old episode of Bergerac, for example, and you’ll find the pacing is so different. Fires in the Fall, the fabled creepy Christmas special of 1986 is well worth a look (though don’t watch it right before going to bed) for several reasons. The plot really takes time to get going, almost as if you’re not going to turn it over after 10 seconds if you get bored. As well as that, shows went 30 or 40 minutes before anyone even got killed; it seems John Nettles had a lot less death to deal with in Jersey than he does in Midsomer, where the corpses stack up before every ad break.
What The Killing‘s first series combined, over 20 hour-long episodes, was a whodunit with a drama about the effect of the crime on those who were left behind, along with a political thriller. It was like 24, but without the torture porn and the need for explosions. No mean feat for a bit of Sunday night telly, but there it was. We had time to learn about the various suspects and characters, to rule them out and then think they might have done it after all. Who knew? No one knew. Even the actors didn’t know.
Unusually, The Killing is written as the series is filmed, with the main writers taking account of the actors’ interpretations and including them in future episodes. It’s this relationship between actors and their characters that makes it feel like a real collaborative effort — plus no one knew who would be the killer or whether they would live or die until they got the next script, so they were as much in the dark as we, the audience were.
Catch the first series if you can, but keep your head down and don’t mention it to anyone who might have seen it; you won’t want the revelation of the killer and the noir-heavy denouement spoiled for you, that’s for sure. Best to just lock yourself away.
At the heart of Forbrydelsen was and is Sarah Lund, the flawed detective played by Sofie Grabol. If The Killing had been set in England, you just know Lund would have been a ballbreaker or a bitch, power-dressed and full of that ghastly “feistiness” that all female leads are forced to have nowadays. But no: instead, the protagonist is quite passive, almost annoyingly so at times, thinking rather than articulating. She’s not even brilliantly deductive: like Morse, she gets to the truth by simply wearing it down. What she has, above all, is patience and persistence — the kind of qualities that are rewarded with this kind of superior crime drama.
So, jumpers at the ready. Series 2 is here. Just don’t tell me who did it, or there’ll be a real crime.
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