Modus

Every time I think they're pulling out of the silliness, they dive back in. It's a shame.

This doesn't meet the higher standards I'm used to in watching Scandinavian shows (The Bridge, The Killing, Borgen, etc.). Frankly, it comes across as a a more lazy American version. Too bad.

This series is so bad it's hilarious. It's one of the worst written, poorly acted series I've seen for some time. The person who wrote this has absolutely no idea how actual police procedures work. Almost everything the police do here is something that would never happen. The male lead detective goes through the whole series like he's stoned. He's barely alive he's so laid back and slow moving. And he does no detecting whatsoever. He just seems to be there to give the female lead a ride home and gets phone calls from all the people actually doing some work. And if you want to hear some atrocious American accents, watch this show. Even the minor details are ludicrous, like the female lead driving a car she has to hotwire to start. By the 5th episode we were watching this just to see how many stupid, ridiculous things happen (it's almost every scene).

So many good detective shows coming from Scandinavia -- this is not one of them. It's way too long for the minuscule plot, which has constant and weird holes throughout. The lead actress is absurdly bad -- she only seems to have three facial expressions, all of which are rather unpleasant. The southern American accents are ridiculously wrong. The lead character is supposed to be a brilliant profiler but she's lame beyond belief -- her comment when seeing a CEO with a portrait of his grandfather rather than his father in his office is that the man must love his grandfather more than his father -- um, right. Finally, the series ending is quite possibly the silliest and the most predictable in tv show history. The reason this monstrosity is worth two stars instead of one is that the two young girls who play the lead's daughters are excellent -- they totally upstage the adults. But that's not enough to waste so many hours of your life on sub-standard tv.

'The Killing' established a certain template for Scandinavian crime drama: dark, moody, intense, understated, and with a tough, and not conventionally feminine, leading female protagonist. The recipe was followed pretty much exactly in 'The Bridge'; and many of the same elements are also present in 'Modus'. But for my money, 'The Killing' was great because of brilliant acting (and occasionally writing), rather than because it unlocked inherently magic elements, and for me, 'Modus' falls a bit flat. It's one thing to tell a complex multi-part story of a criminal investigation, one which impacts upon the private lives of its characters; but it's another to make this into a cohesive story, one which makes intrinsic sense and makes the viewer care beyond the latest twist. And to my mind, any plot based upon the idea of the serial killer with the premeditated plan is at a disadvantage even before it starts. 'Modus' isn't awfully done, and maybe I'm just a bit Scandi'd out, but it certainly lacks the freshness that the first season of 'The Killing' such a success.