The Killing

Is anyone watching this? It is the new AMC series, an American remake of the wildly popular Danish series. Each episode is one day in a police investigation of a killing, so presumably it will be solved in 12-13 days. I have not seen the Danish original, but apparently this first US season hews pretty faithfully to the original. It is too soon to say how good it is — I am three episodes in — but there are promising signs. It is highly derivative of… well, countless dramas of the recent past. There are elements of Twin Peaks, without the supernatural gloss, and several interesting echoes of the X-Files. It is set in Seattle, and the rain and gloom are a major part of the atmospherics. The lead detective is Mireille Enos, and she bears a striking resemblance to a young, harried Gillian Anderson. You don’t get clues so much as new elements of horror. The cast of potential killers gets longer every episode. But while it tiptoes along the edge of melodrama all the time, there is something that sets this drama above the run-of-the-mill police procedural. The depictions of the family of the slain girl, Rosie Larsen, are especially poignant: that father trying to comfort the remaining children; the mother holding her breath under water in the bath to try to imagine what it was like for her daughter to drown to death; the younger son setting a plate for Rosie by mistake. This may not deliver on the promise, but there is promise.