This review compares the tone of the show to Twin Peaks:
It’s impossible to watch the opening moments of AMC’s new series “The Killing” (Sundays at 9 p.m./8 Central, starting April 3) without thinking of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s groundbreaking “Twin Peaks.” It’s not just the Pacific Northwest setting, perpetually overcast skies and rumbling synth chords that spark a trip down memory lane; it’s the series’ patient way of telling a story.
No word yet on the quality of coffee or pie in this story but it appears to be worth a look.
I’ve been meaning to watch it. It’s on over here and The Guardian are going into paroxysms of ecstacy over it, for whatever that’s worth. Though their non-spoiler coverage of it so far has told me little other than that the protagonist wears a lovely jumper.
I saw an extended preview of this show recently while watching AMC. I saw enough in that extended preview to convince me that this show will depress the living shit out of me and probably make me feel awful after watching it. While the story looks interesting and I’m sure it will be as well acted as most other AMC original series, I just can’t take “depression as entertainment” anymore. Other shows that do this that I’ll no longer watch include Criminal Minds and Law & Order : SVU.
I guess I’m just a wuss. I want my television time to be an escape from reality, not a punch in the gut by it.
This show is awesome, on a similar level to Breaking Bad, with some of the same gorgeous cinematography.
It’s sloooow, especially compared to the network procedurals. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s nice to see a show where the murder isn’t solved in 60 minutes.
Also, there’s an extra character on the show: the rain. They did an awesome job of making the pervasive rain of Seattle very, very present.
Ugh. The rain was total bullshit. It almost never rains like that in Seattle. Seattle gets a constant drizzly mist in the winter which mist I think they portrayed in like one scene. But the torrential downpours that were a constant feature of that episode? Those are pretty rare.
Maybe, I duno. I mean it’s not unheard of to get torrential downpour in Seattle, but it’s the exception to the rule. Seattle actually gets less annual rainfall than NYC; the city’s reputation as “rainy” is due to the constant overcast dreary drizzle you get from like November through April.
I lived in Seattle for like 12 years, and I’m pretty confident in saying that the type of torrential downpour depicted in The Killing occurs far less in Seattle than it does in, say, New Jersey.
Other than that minor nitpick I really liked the show though. My favorite part was picking out all the landmarks and whatnot during what I’m guessing were the on-location shots.
Enjoyed it a lot, but I’m not totally sold on the two lead characters. The woman seemed bland and the guy was too gangsta gangsta. The parents of Rosie were great though.
Was the first scene of the pilot where she is jogging and finds a body ever explained?
I thought it was a dog or something she found. It was a very traditional beginning - cuts between two different scenes where they try to fake you out that the cop will be jogging in the same area where the body is. But of course it’s not the body, it’s something else (the same way movies often intersperse scenes of the bad guy scrambling to get out of a hideout and the cops pulling up on a house - cops bust down the door, and it’s a different house from the one where the bad guys are).
I liked the show, though it does seem to linger quite a bit on the main female character staring out into nothingness. I can certainly see its roots in a Scandinavian original (sort of the same way I felt when seeing the remake of the film Insomnia).
Well, the first two episodes take place over an elapsed period of only a couple days. Not that hard to believe it was just really rainy for that period of time. Besides, I think it’s spring, which is pretty wet in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, I don’t think they even portrayed anything I would call torrential by my, admittedly, Oregon standards. A couple times it was raining pretty good, but we save words like “torrential” for very special kinds of rain. I think the most unrealistic thing was the jr detective eating that burger in the open rain. I’ve never seen anyone try and eat something like that unprotected. You wait 'til you’re in your car or under an awning or something.
You should. It’s phenomenal, really. I will try to reserve judgment until I watch the remake, but I am nevertheless a tad disappointed that you can’t just air a subtitled Danish show in the US.
Also people call the original “quiet” or a slow burn, and I know what they’re getting at, but that makes it sound kind of sleepy. It’s not sleepy, it’s crazy suspenseful. And smart. And brilliantly acted.
This was absolutely terrific. Even though it wasn’t actually filmed in the place where it is set, it still nails what I love about Breaking Bad — you get a genuinely naturalistic sense of location that functions as a character itself, rather than something feeling perfunctory and incidental like most television shows.
