The Other Half and I are now four episodes into The Killing (the Danish original, natch), and so far I'm not quite seeing what all the fuss is about. Which isn't to say I'm not enjoying it - I am. The plot is interesting and well-paced (though with sixteen more hours to go, I wonder whether I'll feel that way by season's end), and there are some great characters in there - Meyer and Theis particularly.
At heart, though, the show is easily expressible by entertainment maths as follows:
The Killing = Twin Peaks - humour + drive - demons + a desire for closure.
Neither of those additions is a bad thing, of course, and maybe the show is a bit funnier in the original Danish, but I'm not yet seeing this as anything more than a very solid modern TV show. I hear that AMC have dropped the ball spectacularly with the American remake (most significantly by stretching the case over two seasons and an extra six hours), which is a shame, because it would interesting to see if the show would get so much praise without it coming out of a country with comparatively little reputation for good TV. Either way, the new The Wire, this is not.
4 comments:
Haven't seen The Killing but Borgen started off slowly too before becoming increasingly awesome, so hang on in there. And watch Borgen next.
Borgen = The West Wing - mawkishness + backstabbing
Fair point. It occurred to me after I posted this that whilst I rejected the Wire comparison, that took me three episodes to fully get into - it's possible this is going to take a bit longer but hit me just as hard. I'm still not seeing it, though.
I caught an episode of Borgen a week or so ago, and really liked it. It's definitely on the list.
I've not seen The Killing yet, but this blog post has an interesting comparison of it and The Wire:
http://sexydiction.wordpress.com/2011/04/16/the-killing-its-not-the-wire-ok/
State of Play isn't a bad analogy, actually, though judging by the first four episodes 24 only works as a comparison insofar as they both have a (sort of) set timeframe for each episode.
In The Killing, though, it's a day per episode. Much like Twin Peaks was, in fact; I'm surprised that connection isn't more common than it is (it was mentioned in the Guardian at one point, though).
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