There were a few weeks when Mare was the only thing I and everyone I knew could talk about - maybe the closest thing to a quote-unquote watercooler show we've had in a while. It's the show that gave us Jean Smart playing Fruit Ninja on an iPad.
THE KILLING DANISH TV SERIES NETWORKS HOW TO
It's an example of how to effectively world-build, how to make a TV small town feel like a real small town.
Mare is a showcase for an outstanding group of actors - not just Winslet, but also Evan Peters as Mare's partner, Jean Smart as her mother, and Julianne Nicholson as her best friend, all doing their best Delco accent work. But despite how many dark murder dramas are out there, Mare is special: It is an enthralling mystery it is a character study of damaged people it is, occasionally, a mother-daughter sitcom. The series follows the titular Mare ( Kate Winslet, giving one of the best performances of her career), a Pennsylvania detective, as she investigates the killing of a local teen girl while simultaneously coping with her own deeply set trauma. On the surface, Mare of Easttown seems like any other crime show about a grizzled cop solving a case. Kate Winslet, Mare of Easttown Michele K. It's the kind of show that lets you have as much fun trying to unravel the central murder as you do thinking about what all the images in the hotel wallpaper mean. But even when you take a minute to laugh at the misadventures of the extraordinarily wealthy, The White Lotus pushes forward with a creeping sense of impending doom, since you can't help but wonder who, exactly, is going to end up dead at the end. It's just so addictive, with its sharp, incisive writing and its cast of eccentric characters, like Jennifer Coolidge's emotionally fragile Tanya and Murray Bartlett's high-strung hotel manager Armond. The dramedy is a classic upstairs-downstairs story, set at an idyllic resort in Hawaii, following the lives of the guests and the staff for one fateful week. Like so many murder mysteries, The White Lotus opens with a dead body, but that's not exactly what the show is about. ‘The Killing’ may be a fairy story – like all crime fiction – in the sense that the matter gets resolved (in less than 3 weeks!), and (I assume) justice is done but it is from the school of Andersen rather than Disney: life is, and can be, inordinately cruel and yet we really are in this together (or ought to be).Murray Bartlett, Jolene Purdy, Natasha Rothwell, Lukas Gage The White Lotus HBO The White Lotus Reminds me a little of ‘Miss Smilla’s feeling for Snow’ in that respect. ‘The Killing’ takes something apparently simple and shows how very complex – and threatening – it really is. The ‘real time’ format also enables the viewer to establish a relationship with the protagonists, sympathies and doubts are therefore deepened by this engagement. And I love the way that one murder is portrayed as affecting so many people and in so many different ways it allows for a very sophisticated storyline, which treats the audience as intelligent adults (such a welcome change!). In fact, ‘realistic’ seems to be the keyword here. The dialogue puts a huge onus on the actors, and they all rise to the challenge: the performances are superbly naturalistic. Of course the plot’s one of the basic whodunnit formulae but the way it is handled is in a league of its own. I can’t remember when a telly series was quite so compelling – years? Decades, even?! Anyway, it’s wonderful.Ĭan understand a fair bit of the dialogue, as lived in DK for a while but the scripting is so spare and taut that this doesn’t really matter. Thanks to a UK-based friend, I’ve had the rare treat of following ‘The Killing’. Why has Danish tv crime been so popular? How does the Sarah Lund character strike you? What is the difference between crime novels and tv crime series? What seems particularly Danish or Scandinavian about The Killing? Let’s get a discussion going about the series as it aires on BBC – it could be really interesting to learn how non-Scandinavian viewers see this series. If Danes repsond to this post, please don’t give the plot away. Kiefer Sutherland) and the Swedish Wallander series, but it is very much its own. I found it to be somewhere between 24 (w. This weekend the first two episodes were aired on BBC4 with English subtitles, as The Killing, and it is going to be interesting to see what an English-speaking audience makes of the Lund character and the series. One of the most widely watched series in recent years is “Forbrydelsen” starring Sophie Gråbøl as the rather maladjusted genious Police investigator Sarah Lund. While Denmark may not have produced the blockbuster crime novels that Sweden has, crime series written for tv has for years been internationally acclaimed – and extremely popular with a Danish audience.