A thread for AMC's The Killing, a remake of much-lauded Danish drama "Forbrydelsen"

realized that said mystery would take three months to unfold & until the final third would be likely filled w/ cheap red herrings, regardless of the quality of production, writing, acting etc.

I should clarify that this is an observation based on what I perceived to be the general nature of the show at the outset, and not anything inferred from subsequent watching of the original series

problem is not so much that the show lacks in any fundamental way, just that the original is one of the high benchmarks of TV drama - all time, like.

best comparison I can think of is the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

i mean thats cool & all but its not even in english so...

Really don't get the love for the Danish original. Sarah Lund was amazing, but aside from that...

really like this so far -- thought based on the premise it would feel "slow" but so far it feels like lots of stuff is happening in every episode and i'm never bored or not having to pay attention to keep up.

the whole 'a remake is necessary b/c lol fat stupid american's can't be asked to watch the foreign language version like i already did' is kinda an easy line. transplanting and retelling a story is ... as old as stories, and can bring a lot of life and new audience to a good tale. unsure if i believe this is a good tale yet.

and for goodness sake, why can't they shoot /something/ on a sunny day?

doesn't this take place in seattle?

yeah. which, i assume, they chose because it allows them to wallow in gloominess.

I noticed that they always crank up the sound of the rain falling when they cut to the politician's office.

I'm enjoying this but the rain thing bugs me. I'm pretty sure it does not rain that hard all the time in Seattle. It rains a lot but not the downpours that you see on the show. It seems like every episode has one or two scenes that take place in the middle of a downpour.

I feel you, but at the same time I don't begrudge The Wire or Homicide for choosing not to shoot much in the parts of Baltimore that have a lot of trees and greenery. It's OK to play up the location's inherent atmosphere.

but the timeline of the events in the show is a matter of days, so it's probably just one weather pattern so far w/r/t the constant rain?

i like this a lot. it didn't seem like there was any particular attempt to make the teenagers' behavior seem shocking or all that unusual.

weirdly the thing i thought did PNW weather really well was twilight.

This is well paced. So damn gloomy and depressing though. Not a drama fan at all but each episode leaves you hanging so expertly its hard not to crave the next bit.

i was right about some of the guys being mobbed up

i take it the feds are investigating the mob & their connections (which probably includes the current mayor and likely also includes that female campaign operative who is not to be trusted b/c she is from a longtime political family). and i wonder if someone in the larsen immediate family was an informant.

shoot i bet rosie found out something she wasn't supposed to know and told bennett or mohammed or the imam, who told the feds

also somebody's going to blackmail richmond for hooking up with that staffer, there's a camera in the room, the show shoots things from a certain perspective to let you know someone else is watching who's not in the scene

The guy did make the "I thought you two were connected at the hips" crack right after the hooking up scene.

How is this holding up against the original?

Never saw the original but this is really well done.

I would have preferred to start watching this once all the episodes were available...

yeah, that's the tactic I'm taking.

loved this until this week where it is starting to bug me and I have a feeling the plot is going in a direction I don't care about and find irritating (the terrorist stuff). Also getting tired of Ensign Ro Cox Caine Maryanne staring vacantly into space, and the mayoral race storyline is a fucking snooze. But I'll stick with it.

imo the terrorist stuff is a red herring

yeah i mean obv that was just a little diversion (that took up, what, 10 minutes of screentime?)

but ahmed's still talking on the phone to mohammed about the passports so no

it seemed really 24 to me in a bad way

What the fuck has happened to this show?

Sarah Linden is just awful at everything she does.

Just a coincidence that some kid writes "KILLER" on the dry erase board on the same day that Ahmed shows up at school unannounced.

stopped watching two episodes ago out of boredom, felt vaguely guilty but it's lookin like the right call based on reactions in here and elsewhere (eg. http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/05/23/amc_the_killing_episode_9_undertow)

i haven't been keeping up because the original exists, but the US reaction is sort of interesting

The first was the revelation that the mysterious Muhammed did, in fact, help abduct the Muslim girl Aisha, not for purposes of molestation or murder, but to save her from genital mutilation prior to an arranged marriage. That "The Killing" would toss off a twist like this suggests a racist mentality more troubling than anything explored in the show's pat images of discrimination against Seattle's Muslims. Female genital mutilation is a political and cultural powder keg that deserves to be placed at the center of a series, or at least a multi-episode arc within a series, rather than treated as a handy way to strike a character from a list of murder suspects.

well, if the expert dramaturge matt zoller seitz says so, i guess...

mzs's vitriol towards this show is pretty entertaining. I mean the show is a massive disappointment but mzs goes SO hard at it every week.

this past week was way better.

the resolution of this is going to be lame.

i mean, really?

the grand canyon shirt thing, now that i think of it, is dumb. but i don't really have any problem w/ this show -- are most of peoples issues w/ it unique to the US version and totally changed from the original?

i haven't seen the original! my issues with this.. well, i am still watching so whatever, i still enjoy it although the writing can be flat at times.. and the twists just too contrived. also, 'orpheus' - is this supposed to be cryptic or is it intentional that it takes about 5 seconds to figure out who they're pointing to with that?

well they introduced that name and then indicated who it was in the same episode what 20 minutes later? so there wasn't any attempt to build suspense.

yeah i think my irritation is more 'what kind of fool would use that name on his email' because the answer is 'a goth who lives in his parents' basement'

renewed

http://i.imgur.com/TUNdm.jpg

Why does he receive campaign emails at his orpheus account?

yeah I wondered that too, sloppy. although maybe he has forwarding set up on one of them.

anyway resolution of this is going to bug me becaues I do not feel that richmond was suitably set up to be the killer; he is too smooth and stuff which is weird but this just seems out of the blue to me. so maybe they are going to surprise me? I don't know.

am I to belive rosie was working as an underage call girl, her aunt (who was also a call girl with the same service) didn't realize it, and rosie, despite being photographed all dolled up in the atm camera, was wearing a grubby old grand canyon sweatshirt to her last visit with a john? what?

She wasn't wearing the shirt. It was in the laundry.

I think it's either Gwen or Jamie or...ah, I don't give a shit who did it any more. Just one more episode and I don't have to think about watching this show again.

plz could one of you has also seen the original Forbrydelsen series simply let me know if The Killing follows the same plotline note for note? I have seen the first four or five eps, over the course of which it seemed esp. dutiful to Forb., but stopped & have not gotten back to it. I was thinking about catching up, but will prob not bother doing so if it is just basically hitting ALL the same plot points (suspects etc.) as the original. i have purposefully avoided web chatter on it in case it does go off on its own path & I might end up spoiling it for myself..

i have heard that the ending is different. beyond that i don't know. i watched a trailer for the american version and the lighting, music, and tone were so exactly the same that it seriously gave me the heebie jeebies. like an alternate universe. this is not my beautiful house! who am i???

it made me feel like i was in existenz.

Hmm, very good finale. Guess I'll keep watching this when it comes back.

Wow fuck this show

no doubt

i knew that other detective was up to something on the side

also s3 is largely about homeless teens, a milieu for which I am a total sucker

just started s3

this show made me realize how much i love inscrutability in characters

it should be a keyword search in netflix

also all this rain & bad weather is good for helping me forget that it's hot as balls here in sactown

Sometimes I like to imagine how bad Holder's hoodie stinks.

How to you take it Linden???

http://plannedbanter.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/mireille-enos-on-the-killing.jpg

The new season, which I would assume is definitely the last, is decent enough. It's up on Netflix now.

Totally off-topic but I couldn't find a general new series related thread. There is an Italian 12 episode spin-off series of the movie Gomorrah out there, so far I could only find a version with Finnish subs. Looks very promising.

Season 3 was so good, I'm p psyched for the new concluding batch

ust finished this final season. Pretty predictable/safe.

Finished last night. Carl and I were discussing the ending, and she thinks that the implication was that Holder and Linden were going to become romantically involved. I guess, maybe? But I took it just to mean that they were going to become best friends again and hang out more. If I recall, neither of them had any romantic feelings for each other through the course of the series, so for it to pop up right at the end would be weird.

Overall, I loved this. It's not the greatest series ever, but the tone and mood of it were very appealing to me.

Series 4 not on series 3's level but really good. I took the ending as relationship romantic but it's cool that it's interpretable the other way.

I'm gonna miss seeing mirielle enos' face making crazy expressions of consternation and suppressed anger.

I remember thinking the final episode was particularly well-directed, then realized its director was Jonathan Demme!

Fashionably late as always, we just blasted through this whole thing in a couple weeks and finished last night. The further I get from it, the more I feel like this was a lot of good acting and directing in the service of total garbage. The killer reveal at the end of season two was frustratingly stupid and out of left field in the same way as that goddamn first season of Broadchurch (well, we've evoked and ruled out plausible suspect after plausible suspect until just about every credited actor has been exonerated soooo...I guess the guilty party is whoever's left? even if it makes no real sense?). And then the reveal at the end of the third season....hoo boy. I actually called the penultimate suspect very early on as a total goof because there was no reason to suspect him until there was. But the person who actually did it? The first thing that popped into my mind was Merv Griffin being revealed as the serial killer at the end of The Man With Two Brains. 'I've always just loved to kill. I really enjoyed it.' That was roughly the level of depth and rationale that we got.

In all, though, I thought those first three seasons were v. good with the character development even if the whodunnit shtick was completely cockeyed. So leave it to the fourth season to completely spoil the aspect that actually worked. I was not a fan of that final moment of season three (although I'm sure it felt very thematically satisfying for whichever writer came up with the idea), but Linden and Holder's response to that event over the course of the final season was completely ludicrous. I was just like, do you seriously actually want me to come to hate these characters in their final hours? What is that? The very very ending was fine but felt kinda unearned.

Wasn't this thing feted when it was new? Maybe there's a reason I haven't heard a peep about it in the intervening years. At any rate, still thought pretty much all of the central performers were great and I want to see them in other, better things.