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After scoring critical acclaim and multiple Emmy awards for series like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, cable network AMC has become something of a powerhouse in the world of dramatic television. And it seemed, with the premiere of The Killing, a remake of a Danish show called Forbrydelsen, that they had struck gold yet again. By the time the insanely frustrating season finale rolled around, though, the shine had come off—and while ratings remained strong enough to warrant a second season, it’ll have a lot of work to do to win back those who felt burned by inconsistent storytelling.
It has to be said that The Killing started with promise. In the moody, evocative pilot, the audience is introduced to Detective Sarah Linden (Mereille Enos), who’s due to leave her Seattle post to start a new life with her son and fiancé in California. As is so often the case in fiction, she’s called in on her last day to investigate the disappearance of a local girl named Rosie Larson. When Rosie’s body is discovered, Sarah finds herself unable to give up the case, working with her eventual replacement, Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman), to find the killer. The series also tracks the effects of Rosie’s murder on other members of the community—most notably her grief-stricken parents, Mitch (Michelle Forbes) and Stan (Brent Sexton), and local mayoral candidate Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell).
Given the strength of the performances by the main cast, I ought to be praising The Killing to the heavens. Enos and Kinnaman play well off each other as the taciturn Linden and the volatile Holder. Sexton and Forbes convey the raw grief of parents suffering a terrible and sudden loss in ways that are sometimes difficult to watch. And Campbell rounds out the experience playing an outwardly decent politician who may well be a murderer. Each one takes difficult material and finds a way to make it work, which makes it all the more maddening that they’re trapped in a story that doesn’t seem worthy of them.
The storytelling in The Killing doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. In the early goings, a series of red herring suspects are trotted out on cliffhanger endings, only to be summarily dismissed the next week. Subplots meander or lead to dead ends that do nothing to propel the story and sometimes actively detract from it. And the Richmond campaign material feels especially forced and unnecessary—a show within a show that only tangentially coincides with the main narrative.
By the end of the season, I was just hoping that a clever reveal would make the previous three months of story retroactively worth slogging through. Instead, the show punted its central question to season two, muddying up the waters even further with betrayals and secret agendas.
From the commentaries and a making-of feature on the Blu-ray set, it’s apparent that the creators are at least aware of the audience discontent, if not the structural issues that caused it. Whether they address those issues or stick to their guns in the new season will determine whether or not I can stick with it. Thanks largely to the talented cast, my interest in The Killing isn’t completely dead, but unless something changes, the prognosis doesn’t look good.
