THE ADVENTURES OF SARAH LUND

I wrote this item way back in the early part of October 2011 when we had just spent an enjoyable weekend watching twelve episodes of “The Killing” back to back and I’m sure that we would have watched the rest if we hadn’t had a pressing social engagement to attend. Sarah Lund had just sat down to have a pizza in the home of her prime suspect and the tension had reached fever pitch, but it seemed an appropriate moment to pause. Now, here we find ourselves three months later and we’ve still only watched twelve episodes and that pizza still remains piping hot and ready to serve because we’ve not yet managed to return to that dark, sinister world which we were so enjoying our visit to.

I’m publishing it today because the blog backlog needs addressing, but I’m only doing so if you promise, cross your heart and hope to die, that you won’t reveal any “spoilers” or tell me anything at all about the last eight episodes of series one, or anything at all about series two as all of the episodes still lurk on the trusty DVR waiting for us to indulge in another weekend of European Noir…

I spent rather a lot of one recent weekend introducing myself to the adventures of Sarah Lund on television. Our beloved BBC4 had recently repeated all twenty episodes of the Danish thriller “The Killing” over the course of four weeks and I’d settled down to watch episode one, just to see what all the fuss was about. Despite the crackling cynicism that you’ve all come to know and loathe, I found myself gripped by its subtitled wonderment and over the course of the rest of that weekend, somehow I managed to find enough time to get as far as episode twelve. It would have been more, but I had a long-standing dinner appointment on the Sunday evening which dragged me out into a wild, wet and stormy night and away from the twists and turns of a thriller so complex that it made the plot developments in an average season of “24” seem straightforward in comparison, which of course, they always were really.

It’s approaching the hour… Bleep… bleep… bleep… bleep… Four moments of simultaneous jeopardy or intrigue, all of which will take thirty seconds to resolve next week.

Run credits.

To be fair, “The Killing” suffers a touch of that too, although sometimes in not quite such a contrived way, although you do know it’s coming because of the thumpity, thumpity music. For example, episode twelve was a good place to pause and leave the story for a while, not least because two of the main protagonists had just sat down for a thrill-topped pizza (Bleep… Microwave, Bleep… Serving slice, Bleep… Pepperoni, Bleep… Close-up of Our Heroine… Run credits…), but also because, due to the vagaries of my DVR and its ability to drop transmission information despite its “series link”, episode thirteen had been partially lost (and the 40 minutes I did get were only rescued because I happened to get home at that point and notice it wasn’t recording), and two of the later episodes had been skipped altogether, namely fourteen and eighteen, but thankfully not the finale.

Watching a number of episodes in quick succession does rather remove the “cliffhanger” aspect of the series, which is just as well, really. If I’d been watching the show unravel on weekly broadcast, some of those episode endings would have driven me mad, which, I suppose, is rather the point. Instead I was able to leap right into the resolution instead of spending seven days going “what the hell…?” to anyone who might have cared to listen to me. Watching them back-to-back does also expose the “formula” a bit more, too: A suspect is found and through a series of massive police procedural incompetences that have we seasoned veterans of too many old CSIs screaming at the TV in disbelief, usually dismissed, but the ripples around the accusation continue to effect the other characters motivations and actions.

It’s a peculiar quirk of the ongoing serial narrative that sometimes story arcs are continued long after they seem to be no longer relevant to the main plot, almost as if because the actors are contracted for the whole series, they have to find excuses to include them in the storyline long after the plot itself has no further need for them, perhaps because the “focus groups” have deemed them enjoyable characters to watch rather than them serving any useful purpose to the ongoing series arcs any more. Sometimes the story has to be bent almost towards breaking point just to find an excuse to give them some screen time which is a bit off a shame as it rather ruins the idea that these stories were meticulously planned and plotted from the outset.

Thanks to the rather open minded broadcasting policy of BBC4, over the course of the past year or so we have been exposed to a whole raft of European police procedurals, from the sublimely languid works of the man known in our house as “Henkel Menkell”, but which some of you will recognise in its more familiar form of Krister Henriksen as “Wallander” (not “Fat Wallander” or “Branagh Wallander”), to the more bonkers Italian marvel that was the strangely comedic antics of Inspector Montalbano, they have been introducing us to a whole range of rather wonderful crime dramas that we would otherwise never get to see since BBC2 seemed to stop showing this kind of late night, broad spectrum cultural stuff a few years ago.

The French marvel that is known over here as “Spiral”, however, kind of passed us by as it started before we got the digital signal and was already well into series two when we joined it, had a quick look around in bafflement, and departed, but I’m sure we’ll get another crack at it one day, such is the nature of modern broadcasting schedules and massive budget restrictions these days.

All of these shows have, however, rather impressed me with the intense style of storytelling that is seldom flashy or briskly cut but yet is terribly effective and involving. There’s little in the way of intrusive music, not many of those shouting scenes so popular in British crime dramas and very few slo-mo explosions so beloved of “Spooks” which now seem to have become the norm for pretty much any drama series we produce on British television.

Strangely enough, I also found that by some quirk of fate, the opening episodes of the US remake of “The Killing” also lurked on my recorder as I started upon this epic catching up session so, because I’m a bit of an old televisual analyst on the quiet, I decided to have a quick look at their “part one” right after I’d watched the Danish one.

I lasted about ten minutes. It simply wasn’t the same. As to why it wasn’t the same, I’ll have to leave to other, wiser and more committed heads to tell you, but I think it’s just the nature of storytelling and character creation that is so very different on the two continents. I’m sure that if I’d seen one without seeing the other, it would quite possibly have seemed like a perfectly serviceable crime drama with just the slightest stylistic hint of  the rather beloved “Twin Peaks” about it, but seeing them both together rather made the differences very striking. I’m sure that the US version was ultimately a far slicker creation than its predecessor, but somehow it just felt wrong in comparison.

Anyway, the remaining six to eight episodes of the European version of “The Killing” are still waiting for me to dive back into them and be bamboozled by once more, so I’m going to have to leave you now and hope that I find some time to actually watch the unraveling of the mystery if not the rather excellent sweaters on display, and hope that you now feel tempted yourself to investigate some European crime for yourself.