Harjunpää

Generic characters. Generic glass cop station offices. Generic good guy detective. Generic cool tough female partner (still sufficiently eye candy). Generic concerned boss (he's working too hard). Generic (ie utterly shallow) bad guy incel computer gamer who's also, obviously, a generic rapist (attacking generic lone women on generic parkway paths after dark). Generic forensics team. Generic cityscape night shots. Generic dumb uniformed cops. Generic beautiful spouse and kids. Generic soundtrack. Generic dialogue (ok, make that sub-generic). If you like your hot food gone cold and your cool drinks tepid and flat, you'll love this.

This Finnish crime series is set in the city of Helsinki, as its English name suggests, and is centred on two cops; Timo Harjunpää and Onerva Nykänen. Each story takes place over the course of two episodes. This is not really a murder mystery series; in most stories the identity of the criminals is made clear to the viewer from the start and a fair amount of each story is spent following the criminals activities. The cases are varied; in one an incel killer is targeting women, in the second two teenage boys attack a drunk man and in the third a couple launch a campaign of computer based misery against a millionaire. Away from their work we see how their careers impact on their family lives.

I thought this was a solid series. I was expecting a murder-mystery but wasn't disappointed by this series' different approach. Knowing the identity of the criminals means we can understand their motives even when they are clearly unreasonable. Timo and Onerva are good protagonists; they come across as ordinary people doing a difficult job rather than the typical 'characters' on finds in crime dramas. The cast does a solid job; most obviously Olli Rahkonen and Olga Temonen as our two leads. Overall I'd recommend this to fans of crime drama who don't mind the lack of mystery; I hope we get the second season here soon.

These comments are based on watching the first season in Finnish with English subtitles.

It's not a format I like, that we see the murderers at the beginning of the episodes and then watch the supposed detective work to catch them. As this TV series is based on a series of crime novels, I assume that this is the system used in the books. In either medium, this would be a deficiency to me.

I can guess at why it was done this way. Both of the stories I watched (it's one story per two episodes) involved or less random crimes. It would be really hard for a viewer to guess at whodunnit. Agatha Christie this is not, it's more like Columbo which I also never took to.

I loved seeing parts of Helsinki that I know or have been to which is why I gave a three. But I just knew that I have better things lined up to watch which is why I deleted the lot.

I'm intrigued by two issues that keep repeating in this series. Almost as if the writers had a purpose in making this other than the just making a tv show show.

The first is that the police in Finland are grossly underpaid. There are constant references to senior police almost living in poverty, unable to look after their families.

There is also an obsession with the claim that junior offenders don't get punished there. In many scenes the offenders are arrested and lean back unaffected and say "it's ok I'm underage - I'll just get off with community service"

I felt like screaming at the tv "just record the conversation and play it to the judge!"

Many of the issues concerning the privates lives of the police are just bland and uninteresting as if they just felt the need to throws that in.

Disturbing police procedural portraying the dark and gritty underbelly of society. Very reminiscent of Silent Witness stories if you put aside the pathology aspect, the series has a focus on the motivations of the perpetrators and what drives them to commit their crimes. The novels the series is based on were mostly written in the 80's by a serving sergeant in the Helsinki violent crime unit providing fictionalised accounts of the cases he worked on.

Don't expect inspired deductive work from the detectives though, these are by the numbers police officers who spend most of their time grumbling about their working hours and failing to respond with urgency when given leads that could prevent further crimes.