Outlier

I find most of the Scandinavian crime dramas and psychological thrillers to be very well acted and written; Outlier is no exception. It kept me interest in ways most American shows no longer do.

Ultimately this show is worth it. It is very slow in parts. I mean even for a Nordic drama it is slow. It does have a decent pay off, but they could have sped up the pacing some.

There are several large plot holes. If you can forgive a few glaring "no way would the police allow that" moments and the pacing you will be fine.

Really though Maja was guilty of the same thing she was blaming the local police for. So maybe she doesn't know everything?

I caught this on HBO Nordic as I dig nordic noir (this isn't noir really tho). I enjoy northern scenery and have visited north Norway a few times so why not.

The story is about a small Norwegian town, missing/dead girls and a woman who has moved aboard to study serial killer profiling and now returning to her home town to help the local police and apparently facing her own demons of the past while at it. While the town itself is small we are talking about vast spaces panning hundreds of kilometres and three countries, which makes up a subplot of local police resources on what to really investigate and put resources on.

The script is mostly strong and interesting. I was gripped and I think it's pretty convincing with details and broad strokes. It's also pretty dark story even tho it mostly happens in summer when it doesn't get dark at all. The script is not perfect either tho, but it's interesting. I did sense a bit of a feminist attitude in the script, but it's mostly just a line here and there, not pasted over whole production.

Despite the strong story, it's sad to say that the production, direction, editing and acting are strangely amateurish most of the time. The overall look of the series is very neutral, even boring and the acting is mostly quite bad in a strangely neutral and realistic way. I'm leaning to think that it's just unintentionally amateurish.

There's a low budget feel all over the production, actors use same clothes throughout the whole series, looks like everyone uses the same laptop, one scene caught my eye where a characters mouth was moving while the audio had other person speaking. And so on..

I didn't mind the slowness others have mentioned. I did mind the production values and some script decisions, but overall this was a winner because I really wanted to watch it episode after episode and finished all in four days. There's been many series with better production values which haven't held my interest even nearly as well.

And predictable. It's like they didn't know how to fill the hours with enough content so they just made everything really slow instead. And several of the characters are just annoying including the lead character. I made lots of 10 seconds jump forwards the last two episodes. It just made me annoyed because it was so ridicolous.

Outlier has been compelling. Two stories coming together in one mid-summer, with commonalities in their disturbing events while separated by several years. It would have been easy to present the stories with the crash, dash, bash approach that we often see, but instead the producers have used a steady pace, with the slow reveal of the truth. This is as it would happen in a small rural community where everyone knows everyone, where some have been damaged by the acts of others. Recall Woman at War. The characters were great, and allowed to develop with time and with the realisation of current and past events. I liked it a lot.