Television Yak

I started watching The Killing because of AMC’s track record, coming off perfect seasons of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and I’d heard that its Danish inspiration got stunning reviews. The remake was a spectacular misfire: a sloppy mix of an inscrutable protagonist, every cop show cliche in the book, and pointless storylines wandering miles and miles from the show’s central question, the one it forgot to answer in the end, “Who killed Rosie Larsen?” I’m guessing the show was pitched on the story’s other two tentacles, one watching the Larsen family fall apart in the wake of their loss and the other following the machinations of the political campaign in whose car Rosie’s body was found, but neither of those were grafted firmly enough to the investigation, to the MacGuffin that is Rosie, actually, to feel like anything other than gratuitous time-wasters. Some toolwad executive heard who I assume watches a lot of NCIS, “It’s not just a whodunit, since we also see how the crime affects individuals and society,” and thought no one’s ever done that before on TV. Except for Terriers, and The Wire, and Veronica Mars, whose first and second seasons most quickly came to mind when I was watching The Killing and Forbrydelsen.

Forbrydelsen came to me out of morbid curiosity, I suppose, that’s piqued when you tell me something’s good and all you’ve got is a bastardized mimeo of it. Damn you, psychology, because Forbrydelsen is the same substance as The Killing, the same lack of subtlety, the same filler, spread over twenty episodes instead of ten. Some of the latter is a carbon copy of the former, plus a handful of bizarre interpretations and translations from the Danish to American. The shows are thematically equivalent, the characters are interchangeable, and Mireille Enos perfectly nails Sofie Gråbøl’s laconic, disconnected, utterly inexplicable performance. What’s interesting to me is that I can dismiss Forbrydelsen as a hackneyed, ill-conceived and poorly-written waste of twenty hours while The Killing left me with liters and liters of vitriol directed at it.

Clueless. That’s how I’d describe Forbrydelsen. The investigation story in Forbrydelsen is more of an anthology of unrelated short stories. Lund and Meyer spend the first half of the series or so trying to prove that Rana is the killer, then out of nowhere — after four episodes of being interrogated — he blurts out his alibi and everyone’s back to square one. It was both a relief, since I was just killing time waiting for the world’s most myopic homicide detectives to clear him, and incredibly frustrating, wiping out whatever intellectual investment I’d put into the murder mystery so far. The Killing played that same trick, ending each episode with a mountain of evidence against a specific person, then waiting a week and finding their alibi in the first scene of the next episode. I’m curious if Veena Sud will continue the tradition in season two, now that Richmond has been arrested and (we assume) he’s been framed. Once Lund and Meyer and show creator Søren Sveistrup have completely forgotten about Rana — this would be day ten — the investigation focuses on Troels Hartmann and he spends four episodes dancing around a cryptic alibi until letting himself off the hook.

It’s Kim Bauer and the cougar — Sveistrup has twenty hours he has to fill with something. I assume that’s also why the attitude at the campaign headquarters changes on a daily basis: if today they’re satisfied the Nanna case  is politically advantageous, then tomorrow they’ll be frantically calling Lund and trying to monitor and contain the damage from their involvement. That’s why Pernille and Theis can’t decide which one of them is going to try and accept their loss and which one’s going to go bonkers each day. That inconsistency, that inability to pin down the main characters and the how and why that make them tick — I don’t know. It feels like plain old incompetence in the Danish version, while I could swear that the American show is doing it on purpose. The eighteenth and nineteenth episodes go into some random psychological drama territory where out of nowhere some random police bureaucrats accuse Lund of being mentally unstable and confabulating a perpetrator. We the audience know that accusation is false: we saw Lund upstairs in the building and we saw the criminal downstairs in the building and all that nonsense would be a total waste of everyone’s time even if there weren’t a triple-murderer on the loose at this very moment. And my response is just, “Oh, well, at least they’re trying. ‘A’ for effort… okay, ‘B+’ for effort.”

If Veena Sud had pulled that shit…

But then again, Forbrydelsen had the good taste to not rest a shoddy and eventually inconsequential plot point on the issue of female genital mutilation, so it’s not like it was out to earn resentment or anything. Everything else that it clumsily stumbles into — the gruff, impolitic but brilliant investigator who’s taken off the case three-quarters of the way through, the roughly drawn characters with the bluntest of motivations, the never-ending and largely irrelevant political machinations laid out solely to push Hartmann into a cynical moral quandary, and especially the super-cheeseball denouement and its consequences for the Birk Larsen family — I’ve seen them before in other stuff that doesn’t suck. Lund’s sweaters that look like they came from some rocky island in the Baltic Sea, woven by natives who shear wool from the wild mountain goats — those I’ve never seen before, and they do suck.

In which it turns out that Nanna had a bank account, a PG-13 rated job, and something resembling a mind of her own.

Halfway through the Danish series, somewhere around episode nine of the American variation, there’s that moment, “I guess we’re back at square one.” So, the previous nine hours I devoted to this story were just a waste of time. It sure looks that way.

The theme of this episode is basically stuff our intrepid detectives overlooked while chasing down false leads. The car, for example — it turns out it wasn’t even at the school when Nanna left. Lund and Meyer might have checked that out before forming their media lynch mob. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.

Meanwhile, I’ve seen enough episodes of Law & Order to know that the homicide detectives also pull the vic’s financials, and their luds, and the police boss is always like, “Talk to people at the party, see if anyone else got hot-headed that night.” And in the next scene, one of the detectives would discover, “Looks like the Larsen girl had her own savings account. Eleven-thousand dollars.” Or Danish-bucks. Or whatever.

“Where’d she get that sorta money?”

And then Detective Briscoe would make some comment so cheesy that Henny Youngman would be turning in his grave. God, Lenny was awesome. You hear that, Sofie Gråbøl? Be more like Jerry Orbach. Except not dead.

Our other revelation is that slutty Aunt Charlotte got Nanna a job waitressing at the Ikea-after-dark style bar she works. You can see Pernille, who, in her mourning, had never looked particularly haggard and senescent until now, hiding herself like a lurker and imagining Nanna bringing drinks to douchebag Norweigan male models while showing some bare back and maybe an ankle or calf. Nanna’s employment is probably another thing that the police should’ve investigated by now — in fact, as far as we know, the police still don’t know anything about Nanna’s extracurricular activities, aside from writing inappropriate erotic short stories.

It’s probably not a huge stretch — maybe it is for the Copenhagen police, but not so much for anyone who’s ever seen a modern mystery — to draw a picture from here. Nanna hooked up with one of the club’s patrons. She wanted to move in with him, Theis refused to let her.

Nanna’s life almost seems quaint, at least compared to the case details in The Killing, which had the feeling of lascivious old men trying playing a game of chicken with AMC’s censors: “Can we make Rosie fourteen? No, too young… how about fifteen?” Neither version of the show has done an incredible job of introducing us to the victim — they’re both focused on Sarah’s emotional interaction with police work — but only The Killing made a point of dumbing down its Madonna-whore dichotomy with just throwing every societal taboo into Rosie’s as a shorthand for her loss of innocence. An underage escort working out of an Indian casino, beyond the reach of state laws: really? The villains in The Killing should be twirling their pencil mustaches and petting white Persian cats in their laps.

Now, it’s completely possible that Forbrydelsen is trying the same trick, and there’s some kind of societal equivalence between casino sex work in America and waitressing at an upscale, trendy bar in Copenhagen. I can’t say I see anything wrong, or creepy, or inappropriate with a nineteen-year-old woman bartending, certainly not in the same sense as prostitution, or underage prostitution. It’s probably a failure with Forbrydelsen, but it works out okay in the end as something besides an indictment for the victim.

In which the show makes no mention of female circumcision.

I mentioned before that Forbrydelsen has some seams showing that I’m not convinced I’d be able to pick out if I hadn’t already seen the clumsy American remake shine a spotlight on all of the story’s warts. These two episodes are where I’m deeply wondering how much The Killing has prejudiced my impressions of Forbrydelsen, since they line up, at least on the surface, with the egregious homeland security sub-plot in The Killing, and I might be cringing just from the resemblance. Nevertheless, Forbrydelsen is so sensationalized, yet so much less sensationalized than its cousin, that I can see this version being the adult trek into the heart of darkness that AMC advertised before handing us a meandering snuff film instead.

Or maybe it’s still overkill. Look at the way evidence stacked up against Rama: Sarah pulls the idea that Nanna was sleeping with a teacher right out of the thin air surrounding the long exposition preceding it. Even though there’s a teacher at the school holding onto a copy (maybe the copy) of Nanna’s erotic fiction and a pile of Danish Barely Legal, Lund and Meyer decide to focus on a five year old accusation that was completely recanted. Rana just happens to be re-flooring his apartment, so he has sheeting and plastic ties, and he just happens to have a toy helicopter than runs on ether. (Was this the first we heard about Nanna being chloroformed?) And he has no alibi for the whole weekend. And he called to cancel the repairman. All of that’s just a little too convenient, isn’t it, Forbrydelsen? I know that there’s plenty of evidence elsewhere in the series for Sarah’s minimal competence — although Danish Sarah seems like an infinitely better detective than American Sarah — but the fault here lies all with the writers.

Not to mention that the writers haven’t given us any other suspects. That’s the story’s biggest flaw for me, the one that precipitates the rest of the writing’s often flimsy patchwork. Without any alternatives, there’s nowhere to go but pushing Rana and Theis towards an undue confrontation and the emotional mess of the aftermath. This is why the conflict in a normal story gets resolved near the end, and not one-third of the way through.

All that being said, the toned down version of the chapter in Forbrydelsen worked a lot better than I could’ve expected. Maybe the garage crossed a very faint line, but Forbrydelsen maintained a baseline level of trust in the audience to figure out that the poor guy’s not a villain and let the cliffhanger focus on his experience, rather than Sarah and partner interviewing some random girl we’ll never see again.