After The Killing, BBC4 seems to have found a scheduling niche to rival its Friday music docs. But is there something peculiarly English about our fondness for Wallander, Sarah Lund et al?
In an unpleasant location, the body of a young woman is discovered. A detective is called to investigate, who brings not only a high level of expertise, but also a slightly careworn, been-round-the-block level of suspicion and world-weariness. And so begins another quality European detective drama: flawed hero/heroine, institutional cynicism and corruption, wheels within wheels. The crime is solved, of course, but somehow the solution is all faintly tinged with regret, collateral damage and moral compromise.
This, pretty much, is the thrust of Spiral, a French detective drama which begins its third season on BBC4 on Saturday ? we'll be blogging every episode. But you could be forgiven for thinking that we were talking about some of the other occupants of this particular time slot. Most recently, that would be The Killing, in which a woman with a distinctive sweater investigated the death of a high-school student. And before that, Wallander, about a middle-aged cop who carried a badge, a gun, and significant emotional baggage. Increasingly, nothing says "It's Saturday night, it's BBC4" like the discovery of a mutilated European teenager.
As its growing band of devotees already know, Spiral is a worthy inheritor of this gruesome Saturday night slot. Based around the investigations of Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust), the show homes in on the grisliness of forensic, 21st-century police work (the title of this series is The Butcher Of La Villete), but also reveals the bigger picture, and underlying human truths. We meet flawed co-workers ("I have cocaine and hookers," says Berthaud's colleague Gilou, "you have your blunders ?") and judges whose respect for the law has distanced them from relationships with actual people.
So profoundly steeped are we in American cop show culture, we're a lot harder to surprise: we know the slang, the tropes and the attitudes
It's a great series, if filled with more routine police brutality than its predecessors, but it has additional significance right now as the latest example of our unquenchable thirst for longform European detective shows. As impressive as is the buying power demonstrated lately by Sky Atlantic, the satellite channel which has hoovered up HBO offerings like Treme, Boardwalk Empire and Bored To Death, we actually seem to be yearning for something a bit less exclusive. The Killing was an incremental, unhyped hit, its burgeoning audience catching up via sensible old iPlayer; on occasion, it even got a larger audience than Mad Men. For Sky you imagine it's faintly galling.
Why are we so into these European shows? If we were Kurt Wallander, this is where we'd get in from work, put on an opera CD, have one of our three cigarettes per episode, and mull over the evidence ?
That we're now well-accustomed to longform TV, and tired of the flashiness and closure that still seems the goal of most mainstream US cop series is a given. These are also, you might uncontroversially say, troubled times, something that is reflected in both the content of these shows and their ambiguity; there are, they repeatedly imply, no simple answers, and who can't empathise with that?
Perhaps another key quality is simply freshness. So profoundly steeped are we in American cop show culture, we're a lot harder to surprise: we know the slang, the tropes and the attitudes. Yet ? if Spiral is to be believed ? a little over 200 miles from central London, bent, coke-addicted coppers are kicking in paedophiles' heads in a place we chiefly think of as home to Carla Bruni. No wonder the European detectives are so appealing; in their various ways, they're doing all this right under our noses.
There's also the attractive cultural intimacy offered (or at least apparently offered) by these shows. Who knew that leaving dos in Sweden and Denmark were weird events where people hire fancy dress and sit round a table getting pissed wearing Viking helmets? Or that racism was the skeleton in the closet of an entire continent? Then there's the simple familiarity granted us by multi-part shows. The more time you spend with your compromised antihero, the more you get to know their ways. How did Lund get her much-discussed jumper fixed when she was stabbed while wearing it in The Killing? Because her mother, in addition to being distant and judgmental, is also a dressmaker!
Before The Killing came to the UK it had been seen in Austria, Belgium, and Australia. It's also been remade for US TV
The European cop is fresh to Americans, too. As early as the 1970s the disaffected, perpetually ill, work-addicted detective Martin Beck (hero, if that's the word, of a series of novels by Maj Sj�wall and Per Wahl��), was adapted for Hollywood, resulting in The Laughing Policeman: that rare thing, a bad Walter Matthau film. The Killing, meanwhile, has been remade by AMC for an American audience. One wonders if sometimes the magic, quite literally, won't translate.
A little over 20 years ago, however, one would not have been surprised to learn that longform TV from Europe was a big deal in 2011. Back then, the BBC screened the groundbreaking German series Heimat ("Homeland"), which chronicled the nation's domestic and political condition in the first part of the 20th century. Channel Four meanwhile, offered a global TV experience with the great continent-spanning drug trade yarn Traffik (later remade as a Hollywood movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones). Since then, however, we would seem to have been napping a little; before The Killing came to the UK it had been seen in Austria, Belgium, and Australia. It's also been remade for US TV by the AMC channel, where it starts to air next week.
Still, we got it in the end. And now that we have, The Killing and other European crime dramas have started to feel like a perversely English occupation ? slightly eccentric, but pursued in private by a surprisingly large number of people. We have enjoyed the dark humour of these programmes (inspired, the British remake of the series gave Kenneth Branagh's Wallander a mobile ringtone of disproportionate jauntiness). And we have been moved by their backstories. On screen, Wallander's daughter Linda faced down countless obstacles, which took a toll on her. Discovering that offscreen actress Johanna S�llstr�m, who played Linda, struggled with depression and ultimately committed suicide was a genuinely uncomfortable and tragic confluence of life and art.
It may also be that there's an element of snobbery and slight pretension in our appetite for the Euro cop drama. Last year, I encountered someone who assayed the Swedish pronunciation ("Var-lander") when talking about the show, which said a lot. The person entering into a pact with 20 hours of subtitled television hopes to say something about their highbrow nature that someone with a hard drive full of Midsomer Murders might not. Though, interestingly, the converse may be true abroad, where ? retitled "Barnaby" ? Midsomer is syndicated to a vast worldwide audience.
Whatever the reason for this perfect meeting of crime and time, BBC4 must be delighted. The channel has always had good strands ? its Friday night music slot, all Robert Wyatt documentaries and Paul Weller being passionate ? has provided genuinely fine post-pub programming. The Saturday Killing Zone, however, must be its most successful venture yet, building a new audience of people inexorably drawn to the troubled police officers of countries increasingly too expensive to visit.
You'd say the channel had achieved stickiness ? but that just isn't appropriate language for a crime scene.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/apr/01/spiral-the-killing-bbc4
Stephen Carr Michael Ballack Liverpool Chalkboards Post-traumatic stress disorder Italy
No comments:
Post a Comment