'The Bridge'

31 January 2014

Of the current wave of Scandi-crime TV series I think the Danish/Swedish co-production ‘The Bridge’ (the second series of which comes to its conclusion on BBC4 this weekend) is my favourite. Despite being very violent and macabre it’s also incredibly funny. Detective Saga Noren from Malmo County Police is a brilliant character: her Asperger traits take the quirkiness of Sherlock to another level but we are never laughing at her condition – she is a sympathetic, strong and impressive centre to the story. Her professional relationship with her Danish counterpart, Martin Rohde, is warm and believable and it is really interesting to see how it has developed in this second series. The writing is clever and witty, the photography and direction are stunning and the plot is fantastically convoluted, littered with the corpses of a trawlerful of red herrings. I love the way we follow the lives of a host of seemingly unconnected characters for ages before their link to the crimes under investigation is revealed. It is very tempting to suspect each new character to be the criminal mastermind behind everything that has happened. I’m very much looking forward to the final two episodes and the subsequent analysis on Stuart Jeffries excellent series blog on the Guardian website at: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/series/the-bridge-episode-by-episode