The Bridge

The wonderous world of Netflix means that people who otherwise would only watch tv for very special moments (New Year's Eve, The Great British Bake-Off, and Sherlock) can now follow tv series they wouldn't usually be able to fit in their time or daily routine. For me, a great example is The Bridge, a Swedish/Danish series that is now in its third season. This season has been shown on Dutch telivision about half a year ago, but I only found out around episode 4, and there was no 'rewatch' online. But, the first two seasons were on Netflix already, so it was just a matter of waiting until the third would appear too.

Now I am not usually a detective/crime series person. And The Bridge is very detective-y, and with lots of blood splattering around to boot. The first season starts when a dead woman is found on the bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo (this American-made website doesn't let me put accent marks on letters), exactly in the middle, so half of her is in Denmark and the other half in Sweden. As it turns out, she is actually two women; half of her is Danish and the other half Swedish. The image of the two policemen pulling her body apart is one you get in the first ten minutes of the series, and it is just a small example of stuff to come.
What follows, of course, is a search for the killer. Because the bodies were found in both countries, the Swedish and Danish police have to work together. The Danish detective is Martin, a lovable man with an equally sweet wife and couple of kids. The Swedish detective is somewhat less lovable: Saga Noren is a distant, highly analitic, socially awkward stereotype of the mentally unstable detective. Only she isn't unstable. She has come to deal with her personal quirks in a very good way, and her superior, Hans Petterson, knows exactly how good she is, and what he can ask of her. Only Martin, warm and sociable, cannot quite cope with her at first. But inevitably, they become a great duo, and Saga Noren has become somewhat of a cult hero.

So why do I watch The Bridge, and not for example The Killing or Midsummer Night's Murders or Law&Order or CSI (although I did watch that for a while, about ten years ago). Well, partly because it isn't flashy American. They don't have a grainy photo of part of a fingerprint which they then enlarge 100 times to get a perfectly pixel clear image to run through their database to find the killer. They use their brain, they discuss theories around their photoboard, and they talk to a lot of people. Sometimes half of an episode is made up of Saga talking to possible suspects without them actually getting anywhere. But then, three episodes later, a small, seemingly insignificant detail during that conversation will move them in the right direction.
So, it's a social, intellingent series. But on the other hand, it is very modern. It is set in the here and now; they do use modern technology, and people behave in a way normal people would. It isn't the small, isolated world of British villages, this is big cities we're talking about, with homeless people, drug dealers, and all sorts of dark secrets. Added to that, this series isn't afraid to kill off it's main characters, so the fear you feel when people start shooting is genuine. This puts it smartly between the sleepy British detectives and the flasy American ones, in the middle of the real world.

I've just finished watching season 3, which I won't tell you too much about as it would inevitably contain spoilers. The overall theme though, is 'family', which is quite unusual for a detective (we generally get a bit of the detective's family life just to know why they are so distant/cold/tired/depressed, but not more than that), and it introduces a couple of great new characters which I have come to love. They're already busy developing season 4, so I hope we will see more of them, then.
The only downside is that there are only 10 episodes per season (still a lot more than in a regular Sherlock season, but still). Although, as they say, less tends to be more.