The Daily Beast: "Denmark's Leading Export: Sofie Gråbøl, Star of Forbrydelsen"

Sofie Gråbøl may not be a household name in the U.S., but around the globe she’s now legendary for her performance as Sarah Lund in the Danish television drama Forbrydelsen. At The Daily Beast, I explore Lund’s appeal and the sensational third season of the original The Killing, which premieres on BBC Four in the U.K. on Saturday.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Denmark's Leading Export: Sofie Gråbøl, Star of Forbrydelsen," in which I explore both Sofie Gråbøl and Sarah Lund’s appeal and the gripping tension of Forbrydelsen III.

It is tragic that American viewers have been denied the chance to become obsessed with Forbrydelsen and with the show’s magnetic star, Sofie Gråbøl. The Danish detective drama exemplifies the power of the provocative and globally significant Nordic noir genre, and the show's lead delivers one of television's most haunting performances of the past decade. Gråbøl, 44, has achieved cult status in Britain and abroad for her embodiment of Detective Inspector Sarah Lund, the grim-faced, Faroese sweater-clad cop with a penchant for solving impossible crimes while sacrificing everything else in the process.

Forbrydelsen (literally “The Crime,” but generally translated as The Killing) was the basis for AMC’s short-lived murder-mystery series, which may or may not be resurrected thanks to an assist from Netflix. Outside the United States, however, the original is still going strong, as the enthralling third and likely final season of Forbrydelsen premieres in the United Kingdom this Saturday on BBC Four.

Previous seasons have followed Lund through a devastating sequence of hardships, both personal and professional, the result of outside forces and her own intractable nature. Season 3, which takes place several years since we last saw her, finds the detective’s career on a more solid footing. She has put her past disgrace behind her, and she radiates an unsettling sense of complacency as she prepares to leave the Copenhagen police force for a cushy desk job. “If you lose everything you invest, can you just put everything on the table again the next time?” Gråbøl recently asked in a newspaper interview. “Like most of us when we get older, we tend to think, ‘Let somebody else save the world.’”

But then a young girl is kidnapped—an act of as yet unexplained vengeance—and corpses begin piling up in a grisly (and connected) murder spree. The kidnapping harkens back to the first season, recalling the murder of teenager Nanna Birk Larsen. This time, however, the victim is still alive, and Lund is forced to confront her past mistakes. If she can find the girl and stop the gruesome killings, there’s hope of redemption—or at least amends. An investigation of byzantine complexity leads Lund through the murky waters of the Danish financial sector to the corridors of power, entangling a billionaire financier and his family, an assortment of venal civil servants, and even the Danish prime minister in a web of murder and deceit.

Gråbøl’s Lund isn’t your typical female police detective. In fact, she isn’t a typical female TV character of any kind. She wastes little effort on irrelevancies like her appearance, usually pulling on a Faroe Islands jumper—now iconic thanks to the series—day after day, rather than worrying about her outfit. “It tells of a woman who has so much confidence in herself that she doesn’t have to use her sex to get what she wants,” Gabrol said in an interview last year. “She’s herself.” The knitted sweater is Lund’s uniform, her armor against the world.

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The Daily Beast: "The Rise of Nordic Noir TV"

The Duchess of Cornwall is just one obsessive viewer. Nordic Noir—embodied in Scandinavian dramas like The Killing, The Bridge, and Borgen—have become cult hits in the U.K., and are about to become the go-to formats for American TV pilots. I explore the genre’s appeal, its breakout female characters, and why audiences in the U.S. are unlikely to see many of them in their original form (but it is possible to see them!).

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "The Rise of Nordic Noir TV," in which I explore why these Scandinavian dramas have become cult hits in the U.K., how they are ripe for American adaptations, and their universal appeal.

While AMC’s The Killing has been dumped in a trunk to die like Rosie Larsen, its progenitor, Denmark’s Forbrydelsen, continues to slay viewers around the globe on the strength of its moody wit and strong-willed protagonist.

Forbrydelsen (in English, The Crime) became a cult hit in the United Kingdom when it aired on BBC Four last year, quickly embedding itself within the cultural zeitgeist. Like The Killing, it revolves around the search for the killer of a teenage girl, tightly drawing together political, familial, and personal concerns within its web. Sales of the chunky Faroese sweater worn by the show’s lead detective, Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl), skyrocketed, with the jumper’s maker, design firm Gundrun & Gundrun, reportedly unable to keep up with the insane demand. Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, was such an obsessive fan of the series—it’s the only show that she and Prince Charles watch together!—that she visited the set of Forbrydelsen’s third season earlier this year, and was delighted to be presented by Gråbøl with a Faroese cardigan in the style of Lund’s. Gråbøl herself turned up in Absolutely Fabulous’s Christmas special, reprising her role as Lund in a dream sequence. She was, of course, wearing The Jumper.

“Even people who haven’t watched [Forbrydelsen] know about The Jumper,” said Radio Times TV editor Alison Graham. “Now, whenever a new Nordic Noir show is about to arrive, I’m always asked by viewers—wryly, of course—about ‘the knitwear.’”

Sweaters aside, Forbrydelsen and its fellow Scandinavian imports—The Bridge, Wallander, and 2012 BAFTA International Programme Award winner Borgen, which have been loosely dubbed “Nordic Noir” by its adherents—have become bona fide hits in the United Kingdom. And Hollywood has responded in turn. The trail originally blazed by Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and BBC/PBS’s English-language Wallander has resulted in a hunger for more Scandie drama, with viewers on both sides of the Atlantic gobbling up original-language versions, a trend that has continued on the television side. (Scandinavia could be close to usurping the appeal of white-hot Israel, one of the largest exporters of scripted formats to the U.S., with shows like Homeland and In Treatment. A&E is developing an adaptation of Danish crime thriller Those Who Kill, while The Bridge is a likely contender to score a remake as well.)

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The Daily Beast: "How The Killing Went Wrong"

While the uproar over the U.S. version of The Killing has quieted, the show is still a pale imitation of the Danish series on which it is based.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "How The Killing Went Wrong," in which I look at how The Killing has handled itself during its second season, and compare it to the stunning and electrifying original Danish series, Forbrydelsen, on which it is based. (I recently watched all 20 episodes of Forbrydelsen over a few evenings.) The original is a mind-blowing and gut-wrenching work of genius.

It’s not necessary to rehash the anger that followed in the wake of the conclusion last June of the first season of AMC’s mystery drama The Killing, based on Søren Sveistrup’s landmark Danish show Forbrydelsen, which follows the murder of a schoolgirl and its impact on the people whose lives the investigation touches upon. What followed were irate reviews, burnished with the “burning intensity of 10,000 white-hot suns” aimed squarely at writer and adapter Veena Sud; an overwhelming audience backlash; and bewilderment at comments that Sud herself made to the press. (A recent New York Times Magazine feature on the show’s challenges, for which reporter Adam Sternbergh flew to Vancouver to spend a Valentine’s Day dinner with Sud, used only two short quotations from her, perhaps demonstrating that she’s learned to choose her words more carefully.)

We’re only too familiar with the groundswell of scorn against the American version of The Killing, which meandered its way into an incomprehensible muddle after a pitch-perfect pilot episode. (The acting, however, was often brilliant, as Michelle Forbes, Mireille Enos, Brent Sexton, and others turned in searing performances.) Unlike the hate-watching that has accompanied, say, NBC’s Smash, there was a full-on revolt against The Killing that resulted in a loss of more than 30 percent of viewers when the show returned for a second season this spring.

Many wondered just how Sud would untangle the Gordian knot created by the controversial first season finale, miring the plot in yet another complication with a reveal that Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), the partner of mentally unstable police detective Sarah Linden (Enos), appeared to be a crooked cop, planting evidence and betraying Linden. It was one twist too many in an already baroque season overflowing with false leads, red herrings, and convoluted conspiracy theories.

Frustrated by both that cliffhanger and the general lugubrious disarray of the second season, I went back to the source material, devouring the icily calculated 20-episode first season of the Danish original in a few days, in an effort to see where things had gone wrong for The Killing. Forbrydelsen (or “The Crime”), after all, was a huge hit both in Denmark in 2007 and last year in the U.K. It spawned a second season unrelated to the mystery of who killed Nanna Birk Larsen (Rosie Larsen in the U.S. version) and is currently preparing a third go-around with detective Sarah Lund (Sofie Gråbøl).

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