Harjunpää

The family matters and stuff outside the actual cases are pretty ordinary Finnish stuff; nothing too fancy or shiny but exactly as you'd imagine things to be. The cases themselves aren't too special either, maybe slightly over the top when it comes to local crime culture. Not saying these things don't happen here but let's say these aren't that common in regular police work in Finland.

Overall looks and feels like a Finnish police show; a bit of a low-key ordinary police work, but clearly not aimed for worldwide audience. That must have been an afterthought. Subtitles lose a lot in translation but they're still passable.

The original TV show based on the books was filed in the eighties and it also was a depiction of that day's policework.

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.

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.

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.

There is so much lacking that I'm not sure where to start.

There is hardly any in-depth character development - at all.

Which seems to be both due to script as well as storyline as well as a lack of ability of the actors.

There is no real suspense buildup of any kind and you're kinda left scratching your head at what's "happening" - or not.

I honestly gave it a fair shot but was mostly left with a lot of question marks throughout every episode & generally underwhelmed.

I would call it amateuristic but an amateur series can still be good. This serie just shows a lack of talent imho and I wonder how no one was honest enough to tell the maker(s) during the proces.