Sebastian Bergman - Spuren des Todes

This set of two feature length stories feature the boorish profiler / detective / author "Sebastian Bergman" as he assists police with two murder investigations. The title character's personality is onion peeled away across the two episodes, often painfully and clumsily revealed as a rather unlikeable womanising man, who has suffered serious trauma in his life. But this unlikeable character is able to put complex pieces together in a murder investigation by often sensing that something that appears to fit doesn't fit at all.

Because of the high quality of acting, script, cinematography, and sound, there is atmosphere in abundance, and the unpleasantness of the crimes doesn't so much make you squirm and look away as make you an observer trying to understand what is going on in the characters' minds.

I found the two episodes compelling watching and I am happy to be in a minority of recommending them. As ever there are unexplained pieces or unanswered questions at the end but I assume they are answered in Series 2 which I have not seen released in the UK.

Having missed the fuss surrounding "Wallander", "The Killing" and "The Bridge", I decided not to overlook this latest two-part thriller from Sweden, as much as to see what the fuss over Scandinavian crime programmes was about.

Well, I got some, but not all of it. The acting and cinematography was certainly good, the writing and characterisation less so. The title character is a well-known and formerly accomplished criminal profiler, who has gone to seed following the death of his young son in a tsunami. His friendship with the chief of police brings him an opportunity to get his career back on track, as he's firstly thrown into the case of the mysterious murder of a young student and then, after wrapping that up, becomes the target of an obsessive serial- killer he put away years before.

To tell the truth though, I didn't get the connection between the two stories at all, the overall production seeming like two separate programmes spliced together. The first story was much better written, the various suspects all shown in the act of the boy's murder, cleverly subverting the staple device of the flashback. The second story was incredibly contrived, not only the imprisoned murderer's M.O. but also the linking of the victims to Bergman via his womanising past. Throw in an even more extraordinary coincidence regarding the young female detective who reluctantly finds herself teamed up with him and a conclusion right out of Hollywood and you can see that after a vaguely promising start, it barely limped over the finishing-line.

It doesn't help that the woman-hungry, charmless and boorish Bergman attracts no sympathy at all in the viewer. It's one thing to give the lead in a cop drama unusual traits but not the character defects of the poor man's "Cracker" we get here and his convenient and done-to-death remembrance of the loss of his son pulverises the nut with a two-ton hammer. At the same time, the level of coincidence required to pull together the second story is just too far-fetched to stand up to reasonable expectation.

No, I was quite disappointed with this sour, gloomy, humourless programme, right down to the often funereal background music used to unnecessarily exaggerate the portentousness here.

Drama often works by personalising issues; thus a crime drama needs its brilliant detective, uniquely able to see his way through a mystery. And hence, it's no surprise that programmes like 'Cracker' have used the notion of the criminal psychologist - a role whose real life value is marginal in most crimes - as a key protagonist - it's just so much more appealing than having a crime solved through the teamwork of the ordinary. Swedish drama 'Sebastian Bergman' also features a criminal psychologist as its central character, combined with the downbeat feel of other recent Scandanavian dramas ('Wallander', 'The Killing', 'The Bridge', etc.). Unfortuantly, it just isn't very good, combining ridiculous 'Silence of the Lambs'-style plotting with a moody pretentiousness that is mostly irritating. It feels neither like a thriller or real life (whereas the brilliant 'The Killing' felt like both), a beast as lumbering as its weary protagonist. Sadly proof that not everything out of the north is good.

I've read the books and loved them (except for the third one), so I was really excited to hear that a Swedish TV adaptation had been made. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to my expectations. The books are long and deeply explore the characters' personal lives and challenges, but the show doesn't have enough time to capture that complexity, which left me a bit disappointed, though I understand why. It's also painfully obvious that Swedish TV doesn't have the same budget as major productions on platforms like Netflix or Prime, which is especially noticeable if you're used to more high-end shows. And espeically Torkel turned out very different from what I'd expected based on the books.

Scandinavian (Swedish and Danish, above all) crime series are a sign of quality, but when you have Wallander, Millennium, and Bron/Broen, it is extremely difficult to create something more sophisticated and attractive. Den fördömde does not measure up to the ones mentioned (for various reasons, e.g. tardy pace, uneven characters and performances, over-scrutinised solutions, lengthy references to the past), but for those fond of Swedish places, approaches, topics, landscape, etc., it is still another good experience. And Rolf Lassgård is really great, however, due to his person, there is no uniform team, he outperforms all other actors and is involuntarily brought to the front even when it is meaningless arising from the logic of events. But, with only 4 episodes made, it is not an oppressive watching, just do not have too high hopes.