By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
April 1, 2011
Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman, center, head a murder investigation in Seattle in "The Killing," AMC’s new series, starting on Sunday.
Sergio Leone gave cinema the spaghetti western, but there isn’t yet an equivalent term for Scandinavian riffs on the classic hard-boiled detective yarn. “The Killing,” a fantastic new AMC adaptation of a popular Danish television series, certainly qualifies as a smorgasbord thriller. It’s unnerving how well the Nordic sensibility fits a genre that for a long time seemed indisputably and inimitably violent and American, particularly given that Sweden, Norway and Denmark have homicide rates that suggest that they have more mystery writers per capita than murders.
There are so many Scandinavian crime solvers besides Henning Mankell’s gloomy detective, Kurt Wallander, or Steig Larsson’s hacker heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Yet even among all those popular imports, “The Killing” stands out — it is as scary and suspenseful, but in a subdued, meditative way that is somehow all the more chilling.
This American version of “Forbrydelsen,” which begins on Sunday, relocates the story to Seattle, a West Coast city that in climate and moodiness comes as close as any to Northern Europe. The first season on AMC is shorter than the original 20-part Danish series, which transfixed viewers in Britain, subtitles and all. But the AMC interpretation is faithful to the three-strand plot, characters and mood of the original, so much so that it almost seems like a perfectly dubbed foreign-language film. The premiere opens with two women running, one a jogger striding purposefully through Arcadian woods at the break of dawn, the other a terrified girl, clothes torn, crashing through trees and bramble in the dark of night, followed by an implacable flashlight. The murder of a high school girl quickly entwines the police, the victim’s family and a prominent local politician.
Mireille Enos plays Sarah Linden, a homicide detective who is supposed to move to California with her fiancé, but catches the case on her last day on the job. Sarah is quiet, even contemplative, an observer who is paired with a brash junior partner, Stephen (Joel Kinnaman), who previously worked narcotics undercover. They track down the victim’s parents, Stan Larsen (Brent Sexton) and his wife, Mitch (Michelle Forbes), and along the way find that their case is complicated by the mayoral campaign of Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), a handsome city council president.
AMC has a good track record of introducing dramas that are not comparable to anything else. “Mad Men” wasn’t a fluke, because “Breaking Bad” and “The Walking Dead” are, in their own ways, equally good. “Rubicon,” a 1970s-style spy thriller, was a disappointment that was quickly canceled, but it was at least a noble attempt to try something new.
In many ways “The Killing” is the opposite of American television’s most popular crime series. Procedurals like “Bones” on Fox or “Criminal Minds” on CBS keep a light touch as they showcase ever more grotesque and disturbing images of violence. A recent episode of “Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior” featured a serial killer who chopped off his victims’ limbs while they were alive, beheaded them, then stuffed the remains in barrels of cement. Visual horror on these network shows is amplified with music and lurid sound effects, then deflected with calculated flecks of humor; each team has quirky secondary characters whose banter assures viewers that they will not have nightmares once the episode wraps up.
On the new AMC series, horror lies mainly in the consequences of a crime, not its grisly execution, and that can’t be laughed off in time for the commercial break. The camera doesn’t linger long, if at all, on a brutally murdered corpse. It closes in unrelentingly on the grief of parents who refuse even to concede their child could have gone missing, or on the pain of a friend who feels responsible for not doing more to protect the victim.
And while the murder investigation is stark and unrelenting, relationships change, and buried secrets are revealed in ways that are too intriguing to set aside. Recently, the crime series that came closest to “The Killing” was another imported show, “Durham County,” a Canadian thriller that was shown on Ion and that was creepily suspenseful, unrelentingly grim and quite addictive.
There have been plenty of dark, cheerless murder mysteries on television. “The Killing” is as bleak and oppressive as any, but it’s so well told that it’s almost heartening. Murder is tragic, of course, but viewers may find themselves wishing for Seattle to provide many more to keep Detective Sarah Linden at her desk.
The Killing
AMC, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.
Produced by Fox Television Studios. Written by Veena Sud; based on the Dan- ish television series “Forbrydelsen”; Ms. Sud and Mikkel Bondesen, executive pro- ducers; Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yor- kin, co-executive producers; Ron French, producer.
WITH: Mireille Enos (Sarah Linden), Billy Campbell (Darren Richmond), Joel Kinnaman (Stephen Holder), Michelle Forbes (Mitch Larsen), Brent Sexton (Stanley Larsen), Kristin Lehman (Gwen Eaton), Eric Ladin (Jamie Dempsey), Brendan Sexton III (Belko Royce) and Jamie Anne Allman (Terry).
Making ‘The Killing,’ AMC’s New Nordic Noir
By JEREMY EGNER
The New York Times
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
April 1, 2011, 10:40 am
Mireille Enos in “The Killing,” beginning Sunday on AMC.
The next season of “Mad Men” may have been stalled in a contractual netherworld, but AMC has at least one angst-filled new offering to fill the void.
“The Killing,” a somber crime drama based on a popular Danish series of the same title, will makes its debut on Sunday. The title homicide — spoiler alert: things end badly for one of the characters — comes early in the premiere. The rest of the season tracks the ensuing investigation and explores the crime’s effects on the detectives, on the victim’s family and on a politician with an uncertain link to the tragedy.
“It delves very deeply into one murder,” said Veena Sud, who adapted the series for AMC. “We see the price of the loss of a life.”
Like the Danish original, a hit in Britain as well, the series follows a stoic female detective through bleakly picturesque cityscapes. Seattle replaces Copenhagen as the setting but retains the key “sense of foreboding that comes from a creepily beautiful place,” Ms. Sud said.
“It’s Nordic noir,” she said. “It’s the closest American city, viscerally, to Copenhagen.”
Ms. Sud previously worked on the CBS procedural “Cold Case” before signing on to create “The Killing.” As a female show runner – the only one in AMC’s stable – she empathizes with her protagonist’s efforts to thrive in a male-dominated world, she said, and is betting others will share her affinity.
“I certainly crave this, as do many women I know who are doctors, lawyers, housewives,” she said. “We all crave a really strong, good female character.”
Q. How close is “The Killing” to the Danish version?
A. We’re attempting to go a hair deeper into the back stories of our characters. The female homicide detective’s back story, which is troubled and dark, starts to emerge over the course of the season. We also spread the net a little wider, so instead of exploring just mom and dad’s grief in dealing with the death of their daughter, we also see how the two young boys are affected. So we took a lot of the bones of the original, which were very strong, and just riffed off of it.
Q. What was the toughest thing about translating this for American television?
A. Our culture is much more violent than Denmark’s — Amber Alerts are kind of the daily norm here in L.A. and a missing teenager in a major American city is almost irrelevant. It definitely wouldn’t make the news. So how do we, with all the victims we see on television, make the audience care about this particular girl?
Q. How do you?
A. Because we allow so much time to be spent with her mother, her father, her aunt and brothers, you get to know these people before tragedy hits. Whereas in other shows the tragedy is at the top and you roll out the family to cry at the morgue and then roll them out again at the funeral, we get to know these people and how much they love each other before we learn of their loss.
Q. How does “The Killing” differ from the dozens of other police procedurals on television?
A. We deeply explore characters at a level that you can’t in a 45-minute procedural. A procedural is more plot-driven than character-driven — because we stretch out the plot over the course of 13 hours, we get to go home with the cops. We spend more time with our characters…. In the pilot you think there are good guys and bad guys, a poor victim and a poor family. But as the story progresses you start to realize everyone has a secret — even the victim has a secret — and no one is innocent. There are no good guys and bad guys.
Q. Is it risky to base an entire season on one crime? Is that enough to sustain 13 episodes?
A. When I watched the original Danish series, I didn’t crave a crime-of-the-day because of the compelling nature of going deeply into the family’s experience, the cop’s experience, the politician trying to keep his campaign above water when this grenade has gone off in the middle of it.
Q. Last year AMC had “Rubicon,” another cerebral suspense drama that followed one major thread, and it was canceled after disappointing ratings. Does that concern you at all?
A. No, it doesn’t. I don’t consider “The Killing” to be cerebral. I consider it to be incredibly compelling storytelling with a deeply emotional tragedy at its heart.
Q. Was the fact that the protagonist of “The Killing” is a female part of the material’s appeal to you?
A. Absolutely. It was inspiring to be able to create a real cop, a real detective who’s got the compulsion, obsession and the drive that the best male cops have had on television, like a Sipowicz [from “NYPD Blue”] or a McNulty [“The Wire”]. Her being a woman is unique but it doesn’t mean that she’s concerned about how she looks, or what she’s wearing. And I think there’s a real hunger for that type of Jane Tennison [“Prime Suspect”] character again.
Q. That said, in the original the main character’s sweater has emerged as a fetish object for fans.
A. That’s so funny. When we watched it when we were developing the project, all of us became obsessed with her sweater. The production company had sweaters made for all of us just so we could have them. I think the love for the sweater is totally symbolic of just loving this woman and this character.
Q. Is there anything in your detective’s wardrobe that might similarly resonate with viewers?
A. Who knows? She has a pretty cool jacket. And great boots. Maybe the boots.
A Series With Little Action and No Sex, but Lots of Fans
By SARAH LYALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
March 25, 2011
Sofie Grabol in "The Killing," the Danish crime drama that's become a hit in Britain. AMC will debut an English version on April 3
LONDON — To explain the appeal of “The Killing,” a four-year-old, 20-part, subtitled Danish crime thriller that has become an unexpected hit on British television this winter, it helps to describe not so much what the series has, but what it does not.
It has no wild car chases ending with vehicles spewing smoke and ready to blow. It has no serial murderers and no explosions. Its detectives are not brilliant, semi-autistic types; high-functioning alcoholics; or Bergmanesque depressives haunted by dark personal traumas (although the main investigator is so consumed by the job that she barely ever changes her sweater).
“It’s not action-driven,” said Alexander Coridass, president and chief executive of ZDF Enterprises, a German company that co-produced the series. “It doesn’t have an erotic clamor or a fast pace.”
But, the series’s passionate viewers say, the very things that could be drawbacks — the slowness, the emotional unfolding of the story, the unflashiness of it all — are the things that make it so addictive.
“It’s so much more than a whodunit,” the critic Robin Jarossi wrote on Crime Time Preview, a Web site devoted to British crime shows. “The power of the series is the brilliantly drawn, complex characters, who can make bad choices or lie but never lose our empathy.”
Originally broadcast in Denmark in 2007 under the title “Forbrydelsen,” the series begins with scenes of a girl running for her life through the woods, her panicked breathing forming a grisly soundtrack. This is Nanna Birk Larsen, whose tortured, sexually abused body is subsequently found in the trunk of a car dredged from a canal.
The series goes on to describe, in slow and intimate detail, the effects of Nanna’s murder on her grieving parents, desperate to keep their marriage and lives together; on a politically ambitious city council member who is somehow connected to the case; and on the police investigators, led by the monosyllabic Scandinavian-sweater-wearing Sarah Lund. Theories are entertained and discarded; suspects are detained and released; everyone harbors a secret.
Each of the 20 episodes represents a day in the investigation, a little like “24,” in which each episode covered an hour of a full day.
“That’s the difference between America and Europe — they take 24 hours; we take 20 days,” said Piv Bernth, who produced the series for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.
In the AMC version of “The Killing,” Mireille Enos plays the lead detective, Sarah Linden, and Joel Kinnaman is also on the murder case, in Seattle.
In fact, “The Killing” has been remade for the United States, and that one will have its AMC premiere on April 3. The American version hews very closely to the original, with the same three-strand plot and with characters modeled on the Danish ones, said Joel Stillerman, AMC’s senior vice president for original programming, production and digital content.
“We tried to embrace a lot of what we thought made it incredible, including the Nordic sensibility, the stoicism of Sarah Lund and the lack of that overtly frenetic behavior that you’re constantly seeing on American crime and police shows,” Mr. Stillerman said. “Instead of having a chase scene with a standard bunch of cop cars with their lights flashing, we have things that you’d be much more likely to see in a horror movie — a scary walk down a dark hallway with the right piece of music.”
The series was a phenomenal hit in Denmark, where the final episode had a roughly 75 percent market share. (There was a second similarly popular season; a third is being discussed.) The distributors have sold it to broadcasters in, among other places, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium — both the French and the Flemish-speaking parts.
In Britain the show has been averaging about 500,000 viewers an episode, a huge number for BBC4, a station with a generally tiny audience, on a Saturday night. (Its ratings are higher than those of the same channel’s showings of “Mad Men.”) The series has made an international star out of Sofie Grabol, one of Denmark’s most celebrated actresses, who plays Sarah Lund. It has been a stretch, Ms. Grabol said.
“I had always played very emotionally expressive women,” she said when interviewed by telephone backstage at Denmark’s national theater, where she was rehearsing “Fanny and Alexander.” But this time, invited by the producers and writer to help conceive the character, she told them that she wanted “someone who was not communicative at all, who was very isolated, but at peace with it.”
And then, she said: “I started thinking, ‘Who do I know who behaves like that?’ And they were all men. I decided to try to imagine I was a man, and that was key. After a week or two, the role opened up for me.”
Sarah Lund’s sweater has also become an unexpected object of fetishistic attention; whole discussion threads on “Killing” fan sites are devoted to it, including tips on where to buy such sweaters and how to care for them.
“The sweater actually allows me to tell a lot of stories about this character,” Ms. Grabol said. “The top layer tells of a woman who is so confident in herself that she doesn’t have to wear a suit to get respect. Nor does she use her sexuality to communicate.”
The last two episodes of “The Killing” are to be broadcast here in Britain on Saturday night, after a shocking development in episode No. 18 last week that changed the course of the investigation.
“This is program-making with no mercy,” wrote a poster named KeturahB on The Guardian’s “Killing” blog. “It’s unbearable to have to wait a week to find out — and then it’s all over. Even worse.”
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