In season two, she falls for a detective who turns out to be a psychopathic killer. In season one, her engagement founders as she is swallowed up by an investigation into a murdered girl. She grows, ethically, emotionally, spiritually. She isn’t “special” in the way Hollywood heroes are. Danmarks Radio (DR), Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK), Sveriges Television (SVT)
Lund (seen here with a rare smile) is courageous but not ‘special’ like a Hollywood hero. To be adequate to our moment - one marked by the long term health and economic effects of COVID-19, the terror of the latest IPCC report, and the failure of US post-millennial military excursions - requires the sort of courage Sarah Lund shows. These are the politicians we have largely come to accept as our own: a morally plastic breed whose every move is about obtaining or retaining power.įive of the best crime dramas to be banged up with under lockdown – from a screenwriter When media attention is averted, or if one of them looks like getting into trouble, it is immediately abandoned. Politicians do the right thing up to a point. Public debate collapses into popular opinion. The line between plausibility and veracity is obliterated. Over three seasons, The Killing’s politicians juggle different narrative framings to find one that will stick. Rather the truth is not an epistemological category, only a strategic factor.
Governments avoid responsibility, then avoid taking responsibility for taking responsibility. What makes The Killing right for this moment is its portrayal of how contemporary politics infects contemporary life, a politics of constant displacement and mendacity. It destroys both the man she judges and her own life. In respect of delivering a final verdict, only in the last episode, does she claim that right. The intent of her gaze is forensic not judgemental. She soaks in everything happening around her through her quiet stare. Lund is what my son when he was small would have called “very look-y”. Gradually, the political focus shifts higher: from an aspiring mayoral candidate, to a newly appointed Minister of Justice, to a Prime Minister facing the next election. In season three, the government, the police and a Danish oil company. In season two, the government, the police and a Danish army unit. In season one, the triangle is the government, the police and an ordinary Danish family. As the narratives unfold, they switch between corners, showing their interrelationship. There is time to examine an aspect of murder downplayed by more conventional police procedurals: its human consequences.Įach season has a triangular shape. Season one consists of 20 50-minute episodes, which is long even by the standards of long-form drama.
The Killing (Forbrydelsen) is a three-season, Scandi-noir detective drama spread over a 15-year (ish) time span, that first aired in 2007 (an American version was made in 2011).
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Rutherford Falls: a laugh-out-loud funny TV show about colonisation This is what is made available to us through Lund’s face: a universal point of identification and address. Their response is not anger or resentment, a hardening of the psyche, but the opposite: a deeper vulnerability, fluid and super-sensitive. Now she is doubly so, existentially isolated in the manner of the protagonists of Greek tragedy - Antigone, Iphigenia, Phaedra - figures marked out for an outsize portion of loss and grief. This is the real beginning of the series, the dark waters of ethical awareness Lund never tries to escape thereafter.
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