![]() In this regard, the BBC-PBS “Wallander” displays a tendency shared by AMC’s “Killing”: an emphasis on what might be considered stereotypically “Scandinavian” attributes like starkness, silence, darkness and angst that goes far beyond the actual Scandinavian productions. But the Swedish series captures another important side of Wallander - the harried middle manager, contemptuous of a new generation’s poor work ethic - that’s largely ignored by the psychology-heavy British show. Branagh’s twitchy head case, which plays to the aspects of the character that have been most influential in the overall Scandinavian crime boom. Henriksson’s Wallander on the mild side compared with Mr. Mankell’s writing.įans of the original might find Mr. There’s also less of a sense of the “ponderous philosophizing” (in the words Marilyn Stasio, a crime-fiction critic for The New York Times Book Review) that can mar Mr. Having moved away from the books, the writers and producers have not only softened some of Wallander’s rough edges but also toned down the grisliness of the novels, with their battered elderly farmers and self-immolating teenage girls. ![]() “The Revenge” is the work of Hans Rosenfeldt, lead writer on another highly regarded Scandinavian crime series, “The Bridge.” The bulk of the Swedish series, including all the episodes of the second season, consists of original stories scripted by a variety of Swedish writers. The nine episodes of the BBC “Wallander” have been direct adaptations of the Mankell novels. Some of this difference may be traceable to the show’s sources. Henriksson’s Wallander is a crotchety but not entirely unhappy burgher, newly ensconced in a tidy house with a view of the sea. In Season 2 of the Swedish series, by comparison, Mr. Mankell’s irritable character and pushed him to new depths of dour angst and desperation. Henriksson - not fire and ice, exactly, but more along the lines of cheap vodka and iced coffee. The new DVD set allows for a comparison of the Wallanders of Mr. Mankell’s dyspeptic detective in British and American popular culture, in part because of their on-screen success. Relatively recent arrivals like Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s massively popular Millennium novels and their Swedish and American film adaptations, and Lund, protagonist of the hit Danish television series “Forbrydelsen” (remade in America as “The Killing”), have eclipsed Mr. Mankell sketched out what was wrong with Wallander - misanthropy, despair, thoughtlessness, bad eating habits - and created the prototype of the brooding detective that has become the most popular Scandinavian import in the English-speaking world since Ikea. Over the course of 10 novels and various novellas and stories, Mr. “He didn’t stop to check whether the hare was still alive.” “It struck the left front wheel with a soft thud,” Henning Mankell wrote in “Faceless Killers,” the 1991 novel that introduced Wallander, a police detective in the windswept precincts of southernmost Sweden. ![]() ![]() FOURTEEN years before Lisbeth Salander tortured her legal guardian, and 16 years before Sarah Lund began badgering her superiors in the Copenhagen police department, Kurt Wallander ran over a rabbit. ![]()
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