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.

The killing danish television