The Killing

The show’s tone is set by its leading character, homicide detective Sarah Linden (Mirielle Enos of “Big Love”). She’s a divorced single mom who’s just accepted an out-of-state job and her boyfriend’s marriage proposal; she meant to leave Seattle and its killings behind, but ended up getting pulled in by one last case, the apparent murder of a high school student named Rosie Larsen. Sarah is a walking rebuke to the spunky-and-talkative female crime-fighters that currently rule TV; her dogged commitment to her job and its devastating effect on her romantic life reminded me of “Prime Suspect” so strongly that I wonder if “The Killing” will  make the proposed American remake redundant. As played by Enos, Sarah is a creature of intellect with a powerful moral compass. She’s also spookily quiet, with a placid face and the kind of eyes you don’t dare lie to. She agrees to do preliminary work on the case only because her commanding officer asked her, and because her replacement, a former undercover cop named Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), seems like an immature macho doofus. But in one of many pleasurable reversals, Holder proves different from but potentially equal to Sarah, using his hipster white-boy slang and Alpha Male Dude energy to warm up witnesses chilled by Sarah’s frosty stare.

Although Sarah and Stephen are the show’s anchors, “The Killing” divides its energy almost equally between other, parallel stories. One concerns the effect of the murder on Rosie’s family: her mother, Mitch (Michelle Forbes, so excellent on “True Blood” and NBC’s “Homicide”); her father, Stanley (Brent Sexton), and her younger brothers. This part of the story is agonizing. You know what’s coming because you saw the body before the family did, but the countdown to the revelation is somehow worse because of this — suspenseful rather than merely surprising. It’s all about how Mitch and Stanley will react to the news, and how they’ll disseminate it to their kids, relatives and friends.

The other plotline concentrates on Seattle city councilman Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), who’s running for mayor in a tight race. When the detectives inform Darren that Rosie’s body was found in the back of a Team Richmond campaign van, he and his chief advisor and secret lover Gwen Eaton (Kristin Lehman) instantly interpret the news in political terms. They seem appallingly indifferent to the human tragedy. To them it’s all about poll numbers and media impressions; they have to remind themselves that murder is not an abstraction, and that this crime will have repercussions far beyond election season.

Did Darren have anything to do with Rosie’s death? The way Campbell plays him, it’s impossible to say. He’s affable but cagey, and thus 100 percent believable as a gifted politician.

I’ve liked Campbell ever since he showed a darker side of his talent portraying Jennifer Lopez’s abusive husband in “Enough” and navigating the darker passages of ABC’s domestic drama “Once and Again.” There’s a melancholy tinge to Campbell’s action figure face, along with hints of buried rage. When his “Once and Again” character Rick Sammler was at his most self-pitying and resentful, Campbell communicated an unnerving level of hostility; when other characters read Rick the riot act, he looked as if he was picturing nooses around their necks, or around his own.

All those qualities come to the forefront here. Darren Richmond is a fascinating character, at once warm, charming, expedient and fundamentally unreadable; all this makes him an ideal counterpart (adversary?) to Sarah, a blank slate with a badge. When the two finally have a tense face-to-face confrontation near the end of Sunday’s two-hour pilot, it’s like a poker table showdown between master bluffers. I can’t wait for the moment when Sarah gets this elusive character in an interrogation room and tries to slip inside his head. What will she find there? Pure evil? Or nothing at all? 

“The Killing” is a limited run, 13-part series, adapted from a popular Danish show that’s currently being remade in several countries. I haven’t seen the original, so I can’t compare it to this one. But I can say with confidence that this American version feels less like a U.S. broadcast series, or even a homegrown cable show, than an import.

What kind of import, though? Danish filmmakers were hugely influenced by David Lynch, “Twin Peaks” especially. Lynch’s mix of mordant humor, surreal imagery and gruesome violence might have appealed to the Northern European temperament, and that region’s filmmakers showed their appreciation by producing a number of very Lynchian movies and TV series. The most ambitious were probably Lars von Trier’s “The Kingdom” and “The Kingdom Part 2,” which were in turn remade as the short-lived ABC series “Kingdom Hospital.” But “The Killing” is more immediate than any of its forebears — a procedural rooted in physical and emotional specifics. There are suggestions of a world beyond this one; the helicopter shots over jumbled cityscapes and lush countrysides have an otherworldly feel, as if we’re seeing through the eyes of an angel of death, or a vulture. But for the most part it’s an earthbound show, one that’s unusually attentive to tiny details of body language, clothing and decor. The way a person looks at another person is often more important than what he’s saying, and there are moments when you find yourself thinking like a detective, scanning the wide, densely packed frames for hints of where this engrossing drama might go next.

But it all seemed a bit too neat, a bit too easy. And sure enough, as the Season 1 finale “Orpheus Descending” drew to a close, it became increasingly clear that “The Killing” wasn’t going to give the audience closure — that in fact it was going to take a page from “Twin Peaks” (one of the only pages, alas) and drag out the main mystery for as long as it could.

Plus there was, I realized, a corollary rule to the one from “Murder, She Wrote”: The more certain Linden and Holder are that a certain person did it, the more likely their certitude will lead to tragedy. That’s how Bennett Ahmed ended up in intensive care, beaten nearly to death by Stan Larsen and his surrogate son Belko Royce. And it’s how Richmond ended up being targeted for assassination by Belko, who was last seen striding toward the councilman and pulling a gun from his jacket. (Belko is the most disturbing character on the show — extremely susceptible to other people’s theories, and very easily driven to lethal fury.)

Will Richmond end up dead or badly wounded? Will we ever find out who sent Holder that bridge surveillance photo that purportedly proved Richmond’s guilt, but that could not have been genuine, because the surveillance cameras had been busted for months? 

More important, will detectives Linden and Holder ever be held responsible for their atrociously shoddy police work, which appears to have contributed to physical harm against at least two people, and turned countless Seattle lives upside-down for no good reason? These two are just terrible — and I think their supervisor might be even worse, because he keeps lecturing them not to go off half-cocked, then not only lets them go off half-cocked, but lets them put the full force of the Seattle P.D. behind their hunches! They’re like a couple of Inspector Clouseaus behaving as if they’re the heroes of a Thomas Harris novel, their incompetence backed by the full faith and credit of the FBI.

Because I am bored and disgusted with “The Killing” and not remotely looking forward to watching for another season, I won’t waste precious glucose molecules proposing alternative theories or suspects. I will likewise spare you an elaborate recitation of what I think went wrong, and will instead refer you to previous columns, which chart one viewer’s evolution from wide-eyed optimist to embittered crank so starkly that you could chart my declining spirits on a line graph. (Express elevator to hell, going down.)

I will close, however, by envisioning a series that might have been truly original and surprising, provided it had been executed by the right people. I humbly submit that there’s nothing wrong with “The Killing” that a sense of black comedy couldn’t have fixed. When you look back over the events of this past season — with Linden and Holder repeatedly blundering into bizarre, inappropriate or dangerous situations, pursuing half-baked hunches, and generally behaving like narcissistic jackasses who think they’re the brooding, righteous, intuitive cop heroes of a “Se7en”- or “Manhunter”-style  thriller — you can envision an alternately horrifying and hilarious TV show about what happens when people let themselves get lulled into thinking that life is like the movies. A filmmaker with a flair for the perverse could have had a field day with a series like that. If Paul Verhoeven or Todd Solondz had been in control of “The Killing,” we’d talk about it forever — in a good way.

Unfortunately, I fear that Sunday’s strong hour is still too little, too late. After an intriguing start, “The Killing” has spiraled into flabby nonsense, becoming nearly as ridiculous as “Damages” and the groundbreaking “Murder One,” but a lot more solemn, affected and full of itself. And as superb as that crosscut finale was, I don’t think for one measly second that Councilman Darren Richmond is going to turn out to be the murderer, despite my having repeatedly asked you readers variations of the rhetorical question, Why hire Bill Campbell to play a city councilman if you’re not going to have him turn out to be the killer? 

Yes, we’re heading into the home stretch here, and even a twist-crazy series like this one can’t justify yet another huge reversal. But I don’t buy the idea that the soft-spoken, handsome, depressed councilman is the killer. It’s just too obvious. On top of that, his behavior as both politician and civilian seems entirely too honorable, and his temperament too measured, for him to have savagely murdered teenager Rosie Larsen. (Campbell has been very close to brilliant in this part. It’s hard to give a performance specific enough to be believable as a real-world person, yet fuzzy enough that the writers can imprint him with almost any implication or prejudice, yet he has done exactly that.) 

Another negative indicator is Richmond’s choice of pseudonym as a john with Beau Soleil, the high-end escort service that Rosie and her aunt worked for: “Orpheus.” That’s the name of the musician, poet and prophet who tried to rescue his dead wife from the underworld. In the context of a self-conscious and symbolism-choked TV show, at least, I don’t think a soft-spoken and reflective middle-aged widower would choose such a pseudonym if his ultimate goal was destruction rather than rescue or redemption or self-exploration. The anecdote that so alarmed one of Rosie’s young colleagues at the escort service — Richmond asking her if she knew what it would be like to drown — struck me as more of a veiled death wish than a sidelong indication of what Richmond would like to have done to some helpless prostitute.

Yes, granted, this could be one of those situations where a murder mystery initially leads you to fixate on the obvious, clichéd suspect, then meticulously convinces you that it could not possibly be that unimaginative, then circles back around to a place where you start suspecting the original likely suspect again because time is running out and no other candidate is quite as compelling.

But on the other hand, this is a show that wasted several episodes on a sub-”24″ plotline about possible Muslim terrorists operating out of a mosque, then delivered an equally unbelievable plotline about some sort of underground railroad for young Muslim women marked for ritual female circumcision, and tied everything up with a revelation that two young women who had gone missing in Seattle owned the same pink T-shirt with the same logo purchased in the same vacation gift shop. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in its season finale, “The Killing” pulled another  rabbit out of its hat and suggested that the murderer wasn’t Councilman Richmond, or his rich, basketball-crazy slimebag patron, or Rosie’s former mob enforcer father Stan (Brent Sexton might be as great an actor as James Gandolfini; no joke), but a character, or a marginal and shadowy straw man, that we haven’t even met yet — a wandering serial killer, perhaps, or a john that Rosie met at the casino, or Stan’s former boss, or Marvin the Martian. On “The Killing,” anything, alas, is possible.

At a couple of points it gave me flashbacks to watching late-season episodes of “The Sopranos” — the kind of installments where five or six potentially explosive plotlines were percolating and there were just a couple of episodes left to go on the season, but the show stubbornly decided to just pause everything and wander down the primrose path and meditate for a while on this or that tangential subplot, prompting viewers to grumble among themselves that they were being abused and mistreated and otherwise taken for granted. (I love it when I expect a show to zig and it zags instead, denying me whatever it was that I wanted when I tuned in that week. Does that make me a masochist?)

Considering that Season 1 of “The Killing” has just a couple more episodes to go, this was a bold choice. Between the seemingly off-center nature of the script and all the chit-chat between detectives Linden (Mireille Enos) and Holder (Joel Kinnaman) about parental responsibility and mistakes, it made me think that in its home stretch, at least, maybe this series does know where it’s going (or finally figured it out). Maybe its endpoint will bring everything back around to the relationship between Rosie Larsen and her immediate family, and confirm that what’s important here isn’t who killed Rosie, but why she was trying to get away from her family, or escape their influence, or establish some other, secret identity — and how Rosie’s estrangement illuminates the other characters’ problems, if in fact it does.

It seems important  (and not accidental) that both Linden and Holder are estranged from their parents and from their present-day families. Kudos to Holder for pointing out that by fleeing her boyfriend and their new future and instead working obsessively on a murder case, Linden is in some sense running away, like the grown-up, maternal version of a troubled kid fleeing an  unpleasant home life. (Holder may be a smelly, showboating ex-junkie, but he is not without insight.)

I still don’t have a solid bead on whodunit, and at this point I don’t care. There have been too many blind alleys that felt as though the show was just finding elaborate ways to fill up 13 episodes. And the series’ inability to give us a sense of who Rosie was is disappointing.

But man, did I love the atmosphere in this episode — rain, rain everywhere, even more than usual. And the central performances by Enos and Kinnaman were dark horse candidates for best-in-show. Enos made Linden’s imploding depression and rage comprehensible and transparent, at long last. And I thought the scene between her and Holder in the diner (the younger detective revealing the details of how he got hooked on meth) was superb. The performances were spot on, and I loved the framing, too — the two detectives pushed to the bottom of the screen; the horizontal lines of venetian blinds looming over them, and seeming to squash them down. 

Of course there were tone-deaf or flat-out stupid touches; there always are on “The Killing.” For instance, I really could have done without that early confrontation between Linden and the casino managers, who were pointlessly snotty and dismissive straw men (er, women).  But all in all I thought this was a terrific episode — intelligent, life-size, and admirable in its determination to concentrate on the interior life of its characters, which is something even the most confident TV dramas rarely have the nerve to do. 

What did you think?

Last night’s episode, ironically but appropriately titled “I’ll Let You Know When I Get There”, was much stronger than its predecessor, and the direction (by Ed Bianchi, one of the best series TV directors alive) was smashingly atmospheric. But that’s hardly a compliment considering how horrible last week’s episode was. And at a script level, this one wasn’t anywhere close to being the Hail Mary pass that the show needed to make up for its gross violations of common sense, not to mention its borderline cruel deception of an audience that thought it was committing to a semi-plausible portrait of a murder’s impact on a community but ended up stuck in a super-slow-motion version of a “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” episode.

For grins, let’s set aside the non-starter nature of the political storyline (though I still think there’s an outside chance that Bill Campbell will end up being revealed as the killer, because otherwise what’s the point of hiring Bill Campbell) and the series’ almost total disinterest in the murder victim, Rosie Larsen, as a person, and marvel at the incompetence of Det. Linden and Det. Holder.

They’re presented as bad employees but brilliant cops; yes to the first, no to the second. They showed flashes of inspiration this week in the interrogation room scene opposite Belko; I love the business with Linden coming on like the disciplinarian mom that Belko never had, then tenderly stroking his hair to put him at ease. But for the most part these sleuths are terrible. Their employee evaluations should be festooned with cartoon drawings of poo with wavy little stink lines. I think we’re supposed to take those scenes where their commander berates them as the moody cable drama equivalent of scenes in a “Lethal Weapon”-type action flick where the maverick cops’ superior officer barks, “I want your badges and your guns on my desk right now! I am relieving you of duty!”; problem is, this appears to be a rare case where the screen cops’ thickheadness and inability to follow basic procedure so overwhelms any good they do in the field that the commander is justified in jumping down their throats. Alas, I am not convinced that “The Killing” actually realizes that, immersed as it is in paranoid thriller atmospherics.

So Rosie apparently took a cab that night? And the detectives are just now figuring that out on day 10 because neither of them thought to phone cab companies on day one? And neither of them recognized the key chain logo as the logo of a Native American casino that countless felony suspects have surely visited throughout their tenure as cops? And neither of them thought that “Adela 10:45″ might not refer to a mysterious female named Adela? And it never occured to Linden in particular that “Adela” might refer to the name and departure time of a ferryboat that she passes on her jogging route? And what’s up with Linden and Holder constantly dropping in on potential subjects for 45 seconds at a time, accomplishing nothing except making them seem menacing and loopy? Holder dropped in on Belko just long enough to seem creepy and dumb and junkie-like — and the longer I watch this show, the more Joel Kinnaman’s faux-gangsta whiteboy accent starts to remind me of Poochie the Dog — and Linden dropped in on Councilman Darren Richmond just long enough to have a drink and admit she screwed up, which just made her seem unprofessional and spacey.

And Linden’s solution to her son’s lack of discipline is to move him to a motel where he can live completely unsupervised while she toodles around Seattle, making frowny faces and screwing things up in ways that make the Larsen family’s already miserable existence exponentially worse? Say what? (The red herring plot that wrongly fingered teacher Bennet Ahmed as a prime suspect directly caused Ahmed’s near-death at the hands of Stan Larsen and his surrogate son/toady Belko; by now, ambulance chasing attorneys should be lining up around the block to represent the Larsens in a civil suit against the city.)

There were intimations that Linden is a “Manhunter”-style brilliant burnout whose commitment to the job once drove her insane — thus her boyfriend’s stray comment about not wanting to visit her in a hospital again, watching her stare at blank walls — but at least in “Manhunter,” you got the impression that Det. Will Graham really was brilliant, and therefore worth all the trouble he caused. That’s clearly not the case with either detective assigned to the Larsen case, no matter how strenuously the scripts insist otherwise.

The scene where the detectives visit Belko’s mother might have been the worst scene in the entire season to date. Really, “The Killing”? The aging prostitute mom who raised her son in a brothel and once murdered his favorite pet and putters around yammering and chain-smoking while dressed like Blanche DuBois in a community theater production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”? The scenario was weak, and the acting was even weaker. After a certain point I wanted to jump into the screen and beg the actress to stop saying the word “Belko.”

And on an especially vexing side note, why is it that TV is filled with alleged genius characters whose commitment to their jobs destroys their personal lives, yet it’s almost always the women who are singled out for condemnation? No, Linden isn’t going to win any prizes as a girlfriend or mother. But this fixation on her personal shortcomings smacks of a double standard.

Who’s left as a suspect? Besides Campbell, the basketball-obsessed billionaire strikes me as a possible; there’s a  gambling sub-theme running throughout this season, and I’m guessing that’s what those mysterious withdrawals from the Larsens’ bank accounts are all about. But really, on an “anything goes” series like this one, it could be somebody we haven’t met yet. Wouldn’t it be great if Linden entered the casino in next week’s episode, was greeted by former heavyweight champion George Foreman in a Sitting Bull outfit, and somehow figured out that he did it? And then had to fight him? In a boxing ring?

Industry scuttlebutt says that “The Killing” is about to be renewed for a second season, but at this point that sounds less like a promise than a threat. Last night’s installment contained two of the dumbest twists I’ve ever seen in a show that prides itself on being smart.

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.

The other twist was flat-out goofy. Flash back to last week’s episode: The feds impound evidence from the meat packing plant, and Detective Linden breaks into the back of an FBI van after being warned not to. (The show’s cops apparently learned their trade from watching cop shows.) She snaps a cellphone photo of a pink “Grand Canyon” T-shirt in an evidence box and shows the picture to Rosie’s mother, Mitch (Michelle Forbes), who says yes, the shirt belonged to Rosie — that the girl fell in love with pictures of the Grand Canyon in a textbook in ninth grade, and her family bought her the shirt when they visited the park the following summer. “I thought she’d lost it,” Mitch says.

This week, Mitch, who’s been neglected and mistreated by the police and the media and pushed to the edge of sanity, goes to Rosie’s school to return a couple of her books, spots Bennet entering the building a free (for now) man, works herself into a fury, and eggs her husband, Stan (Brent Sexton), into turning vigilante. Stan and his surrogate son Belko Royce (Brendan Sexton III) take Bennet into the woods and savagely beat him. Meanwhile, back at the Larsen residence, Mitch happens upon an identical Grand Canyon T-shirt while doing the laundry. She phones Stan hoping to stop the violence, but she’s too late.

Now let’s review. In the city of Seattle, population 563,374, police are investigating the high-profile murder of a high school student. At a certain point their case intersects with the FBI’s investigation of a local mosque. The mosque members are upset that the cops haven’t investigated the recent disappearance of another minor, Aisha. It turns out that Aisha and Rosie both showed up at Bennet’s house — on the same night? — and promptly disappeared. Both apparently owned the same Grand Canyon T-shirt. Same logo. Same color.

No, really.

“The Killing” presents itself as a clever, wise, meticulous alternative to the typical murder-of-the-week show. It also wants to be a brazen melodrama that backs itself into narrative corners and then escapes by painting a new door on the wall, Bugs Bunny-style. The two impulses can be reconciled, but not by this series; it’s too shallow, opportunistic and scattered. The completist in me feels duty-bound to keep watching through the season finale. But the cockeyed optimist who roots for every new show to be great, or at least good, has checked out.