hjalsayegh

I'm going against the grain here. The show is based on the series by the same name, season one is an adaptation of the first book (The keeper of lost causes) by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen.

I'm going to be fair and say as an adaptation they were pretty faithful but updated the source material. You have no idea how racist, sexist, all the -ist that book was.

On the other hand just like in the book the detective is an ass just to be an ass. Not a loveable ass, not a smartass, just an ass. In both the book and the show it's everyone around him handing him the evidence on a silver plate... why do we need him again?

My biggest issue however is that the whole plot centers around torture porn. The show toned it down considerably but that's at the very center of this so... yeah, not a fan. I'm glad Netflix decided not to go into the details of the torture like the book did... for chapters and chapters on end... but it's still there and they keep highlighting the detectives internal trauma as well. Because torture porn can be internal torture as well as external.

Think twilight zone only sci-fi. Each episode is a self contained short story last 15 minutes.

Like all short story collections quality varies widely depending on the author, the concept, how it was executed on screen.

Art and animation is varied so it keeps things fresh. More often than not the episodes are winners. Season 4 not withstanding because that... that was sad to see.

The one negative I noted was the heavy reliance on the "sexy" factor, it had a tendency to cheapen some of the better episodes. More so compared to their source material. I get that this is a product and netflix was to make sure it sells but....

At first I was a bit skeptical about the show. A straight forward whodunnit with a quirky detective, Cludo like setting and enough red herrings to open an aquarium.

Here's the thing, Classics are called that for a reason. The Quirky detective is fun, going through the weird events and unraveling them one at a time is fun and leaning on the classics (the episode titles, agatha christie books cameos...etc) is fun.

This show was great, it had funny moments but didn't break the tension of the serious ones. The mystery was good and the people in it were interesting to follow.

I am removing one star though because of all the shouting, it seemed out of place at times when the show was so chill otherwise.