Over the last weeks, I marathoned the first season of the Danish show Forbrydelsen (English title is "The Killing", I believe, though just to confuse me there is also apparantly an American remake of that name, and the German title is something else again), and a BBC miniseries called The Long Firm (based on a novel of the same name). Both were very good, and other than dealing with crime, utterly different from each other.

Forbrydelsen I checked out because I saw it was made by the same team that made the excellent Borgen, and it shows; one major subplot of the first season deals with an election campaign (though for Mayor of Copenhagen, not general elections - one of the suspects is a candidate), and the brokering - and opportunistic abandoning - of alliances between parties, not to mention the wranging of different factions within the same party, feels as sharpy observed as in Borgen.

Naturally for a mystery show, the main plot is about a murder, its fallout and the discovery of its perpetrator. Our detective is Sarah Lund, played by Sofie Grabol, and while her arc through the first season feels familiar - in the pursuit of the killer, her private life goes to hell, her colleagues think she's nuts, in short, what happens to dedicated detectives in this kind of story - the execution is very compelling, plus Sofie Grabol is allowed to actually look like someone who rarely sleeps, tends to wear the same clothes and has no time for make-up or hair care as the story goes on. (Most female detectives in other shows get the occasional "you look like hell" comment but actually look like they spent the usual amount of time in front of the mirror and get to regularly wash their hair.) She's the brooding obsessive type of detective, who usually is male, and Sofie Gabrol has the thousand-miles-stare to go with it, whereas her partner/initially-sort-of-rival Jan Meyer is the sarcastic fast talking type. He's also played by Soren Malling, whom played the tv editor in chief on Borgen but leaves a far greater impression here. Their prickly dynamic is part of what makes the first season. Which also deeply delves into the family of the victim; her parents Theis and Pernille are just as much main characters as Lund and Meyer are, so I expect the second season will be very different without them.

Criticism: sometimes, the show doesn't play fair for a whodunit; in episode 6 a character shows up with key information; he's not the killer, but his existence is important to the killer's motivation, and it hasn't even been hinted at until then, whereas supposedly he lived next door to the victim's family. And some of the red herrings I wish we'd seen again even after they turned out to be red herrings, especially in one particular case, where I wondered whether his life and relationships ever recovered from the suspicion.

Back to applause: As it turned out, I did figure out who the killer was ahead of schedule though the show cleverly made me doubt my theory at one point. (Paranoia doesn't only affect the characters but also the audience.) The ensemble is huge, especially given the whole campaign subplot, but you never lose sight of who is who, and every set of characters have complicated relationships with each other. Which makes for very compelling tv.
***

The Long Firm is set in the 60s and early 70s, and consists of four parts, each with a different narrator. The main character is gangster and club owner Harry Starks. (That's Starks with an s, and thus one can't write crazy crossovers in which he's a relation of either the Game of Thrones clan or the Iron Man main character, which is a shame.) He's played by Mark Strong, whom I've seen in minor roles before, but never as compelling as here. At the start, you think, well, violent Soho crime cszar, been there, seen that, especially in The Hour and Our Friends in the North (Daniel Craig subplot). But it's not just the character focus and the structure - which owes something to Citizen Kane, in that you get various character's perspective on Harry at different but sometimes overlapping points of his life - but also the way the character is fleshed out without this being used as an excuse for his violence.

The first episode, narrated by a character played by Derek Jacobi, an elderly aristocrat nicknamed Teddy, introduces Harry at the height of his power and influence in the early 60s. Teddy, who is discreetly gay (still illegal in England), is compelled by Harry's utter fearlessness (Harry is also gay and feared enough in Soho that no one blinks) and the fact Harry can provide him with rent boys, ends up lending his name to various enterprises of Harry's, which is predictable, and then both Harry and Teddy get drawn into a Nigerian landsell scheme, which is not. At this point I sat up, because falling for Nigerian scams is not something that happens to invulnerable supergangsters, and yet the episode ties it in something innate in Harry's character.

Because I didn't have much sympathy for Teddy, played by Jacobi or not, I didn't truly fall for the series until the second episode, though, in which the narrator is Ruby, played by Lena Heady. Ruby is a never-made-it-to-real-fame actress, the sort of almost celebrity ending up in Harry's club, and at this point he dreams of making his boyfriend du jour an actor and hitting the legitimate big time as a manager. He tells Ruby he wants to be the next Brian Epstein, and narrator!Ruby's voice comments "and why not? He's a Jewish homosexual with guts and big dreams".

(BTW, this is the kind of show who expects you to know who Brian Epstein was. There isn't an "as you know, Bob, I mean the manager of the Beatles" expositionary dialogue here.)

Ruby basically becomes Harry's sassy straight friend, and for a while, that goes well, she even co-organizes the club with him, but of course he is a gangster, and he does things like expecting her to keep the corrupt cop sweet who shows up in all four episodes as Harry's sometimes helper, sometimes arch enemy. Also, Harry's boyfriend, while dearly beloved by him, sadly is no Beatle. Or the actorly equivalent thereof. And doesn't even want to be one. It's not much of a spoiler to say this does not end happily, though of all the narrators, Ruby probably has the best fate.

Episode 3 turns the genre around; we're now in psychedelic phase of the 60s, Harry's club and tastes are hopelessly out of fashion (he's a big Judy Garland fan), his influence is on the decline, his enemies are closing in, and that's when a rent boy dies and Harry gets fixated on finding out how and why. In short, it's the criminal as detective (with the narrator being a small time thief and pill addict who hangs out with Harry), and the episode is probably the darkest of the bunch.

In the fourth episode, the narrator is a Marxist sociologist and probably the narrator drawn most satirically; Lenny becomes faschinated with Harry not least because it flatters his vanity to be regarded as an educator, until to his indignation Harry has mastered to the academic vocabulary and turns it against him, not to mention that he can't extricate himself from Harry's life any more than the previous narrators could if Harry doesn't want it. Plus we're now due for something else stories with criminals at the heart them sooner or later arrive at, and no, I don't mean the death of the lead. The ending is consideringly more optimistic than Citizen Kane, but wisely avoids any kind of final judgment on Harry. Whose believability of course would be destroyed if Mark Strong wasn't up for the challenge; he sells both the man who tortures a disobedient minion with psychotic ease and the guy who cares what became of a rent boy, the devoted Judy Garland fan and the ruthless shark-like exploiter of other people's weaknesses, the dead-eyed emptiness when he's depressed and the wistful fondness when he catches Ruby on tv (finally!) while he is in, err, another situation. I checked the show out on a whim because it was on the international BBCiplayer this January, and am glad I did.