First Impressions of Wallander

There was a fair amount of hype around the start of Wallander on the BBC (a fair amount of hype that is for anything that isn't a reality tv show). I'd read one Henning Mankell novel but not from the Wallander series and was intrigued by the hype of him being more cerebral than Morse.

It started with a harrowing scene with a teenage girl setting fire to herself on a rapeseed field in front of the eponymous policeman. It didn't get any happier from there. The murderer's preferred method of execution was scalping and although you perhaps didn't see as much as was suggested, it was unsettling to watch.

There is something slightly odd about the BBC's Wallander, about the way it has been filmed. It doesn't look like a modern television show. Something I think to do with the light. It might be the daylight of Sweden is different from ours, I'm not sure. But there was something unnaturalistic about it and it looked more like Bergerac or British shows from that time than things on television now. Or perhaps it is a more European look and the obviously British actors jar with the Swedish landscape.

I wasn't entirely sure about Kenneth Branagh at first. He literally seemed too big for the television screen. Rather than Morse, it was Boyd from Walking the Dead that he reminded me of most. Perhaps he didn't shout quite so much and it was a more nuanced performances than Trevor Eve ever gives but it was in that school.

So again it is another new show that I neither love nor hate but will be adding to my schedule to see how it develops.