Gritty series feels more authentic than most crime TV

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Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman plays Det. Stephen Holder, one of the cops trying to track down Rosie Larsen�s murderer on The Killing. (POSTMEDIA)

As The Killing continued its slow-burn moral examination of a teenage girl's murder and the wrenching effects on her family this past season, it went through a process of dramatic refinement: The characterizations became sharper, their motivations clearer, the urge for resolution more desperate. The Killing has told its story in something approximating real time, with each hour-long episode representing, consecutively, a day in the life of the investigation. When it wraps up its final mystery Sunday night on AMC -- a resolution is promised; the killer's identity will be revealed, and the grieving family of Rosie Larsen will finally attain something approximating closure -- it will have been 25 days since the teenager's body was found trussed up and locked in the trunk of a car dredged out of a Seattle lake, in a relentless, misty rain.

That rain -- grey, dour, haunting -- became a character in its own right. From the start, it was obvious that The Killing, as conceived by writer Veena Sud (adapted from the Danish TV drama Forbrydelsen or The Crime), was going to be no ordinary TV crime thriller, with simple clues, simple resolutions and simple, easy-to-explain moral choices, underscored with peppy pop tunes.

After the fury ignited by a first-season's finale that raised more questions than it answered, The Killing's producers insisted they had learned their lesson and would bring frustrated fans back into the fold.

Instead, to The Killing's great credit, what happened was the exact opposite: Sud doubled down on the grit, the grime, the slow-turning mystery. The rain that had critics grumbling came down even harder; there were long moments of Mireille Enos' emotionally battered, increasingly anxious Det. Sarah Linden sitting in her car, as though trapped inside an illuminated but dirty aquarium, peering in vain at potential clues through the windshield while rain pounded down on the roof. Joel Kinnaman's skeezy, rail-thin, stubble-bearded Det. Stephen Holder drew his hoodie even tighter around him in the pouring rain while skulking around construction sites and, arguably, does the heavy lifting in an investigation that threatened to run off the rails more than once.

It's that constant bait-and-switch storytelling -- the red herrings, the blind alleys, the detours, the outright deceptions -- that upset The Killing's faithful the most, to the point where many vowed they would never watch again. (The season's ratings did slip, and a cancellation/renewal decision is still up in the air.)

And yet it's in that very obtuseness that The Killing has most closely resembled a real-world, high-stakes murder investigation that has both media attention and the interest of local politicians, instead of the rote, easy-to-understand TV procedural many viewers -- and critics -- wanted it to be.

The Killing feels real; its investigation is focused on the cut-and-thrust of municipal politics and land development, and how a beautiful, secretive, arts-minded teen may have been killed for one of the oldest of reasons: being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and seeing something she shouldn't have seen.

In a lesser, more obvious TV potboiler -- take your pick -- Linden, shaken by a recently broken-off engagement and raising a brooding teenage boy on her own, and Holder, a former addict who's still restless, would have become romantically involved.

The Killing has integrity, though. The later, more recent episodes have been virtually identical in tone and style to those first few hours. From the beginning, and at great cost to their safety and emotional well-being, Linden and Holder's focus has been almost exclusively on the investigation at hand, even when they were reduced to arguing and bickering over the small details.

The supporting cast has been faultless, from Michelle Forbes' Emmy-nominated turn as Rosie's still-haunted mother Mitch Larsen, to Brent Sexton's bravura turn as Rosie's rage-filled, debt-saddled, emotionally crippled father Stan Larsen, who took out his growing frustration this past season on his two youngest sons before finding some kind of familial peace.

The Killing was never going to be a rabble-rousing crowd please, or ratings winner. Instead, it ends pretty much as it started: a solemn, stoic paean to one family's tragedy, an emotionally wrenching murder mystery that asks a lot of its audience, and assumes its audience is smart enough, dedicated enough and observant enough to keep wanting more.

-- Postmedia News

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 14, 2012 E4