Nanna Birk Larsen has become Rosie Larsen and Copenhagen has become Seattle. In a back-handed tribute to Sveistrup's conception of the series, US network AMC is to premiere an English-language remake of The Killing next week. "Also I never saw grief really in US thrillers.
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"The creation of the series was in part an aggressiveness to US thrillers where everything's solved within one episode," says Sveistrup.
There is plenty of action, but little of it as frenetic as in 24, The Wire or The Shield. There are no heroes, no sex and – in the misplaced analysis of the New York Times – no action. True, its structure – each hour-long episode is a day in the investigation – borrows from Joel Surnow's "real-time" 24, but otherwise it's satisfyingly downbeat. The Sunday Times described The Killing as "the new The Wire" (oh how much the PR people must have yearned for that hackneyed encomium to blurb on the DVD box set), but one of its delights is that it isn't American in mood or sensibility. "In Germany they liked it as a whodunnit, but you guys seem to be more into the characters." That's true: Killing-besotted message boards are more likely to be concerned with whether Lund is a feminist role model or screw-up, rather than working out who killed Nanna Birk Larsen. "When The Killing was shown in Germany and the Netherlands, it did really well, but there certainly wasn't the excitement about it that there's been in Britain," says Lars Mikkelsen, who plays Troels Hartmann in the series. So the viewing figures for The Killing are exceptional, not least as this is a four-year-old series that the BBC only brought to our screens – after sitting on its (allegedly very cheap) acquisition for several years – because (or so it seemed) they'd run out of Wallanders and needed something similarly bleak and Nordic to fill the gap. The Wire averaged 600,000 viewers when shown on BBC2 two years ago, and last summer's finale of 24 on Sky 1 got the same number of viewers. The Killing averaged 500,000 viewers per episode on BBC4 – more than Mad Men or the Swedish-language version of Wallander managed on the same channel. "Otherwise, especially for the UK, everything becomes Americanised." "I think it's good for European culture if there are more and more of these kinds of exchanges," says the show's creator and head writer Søren Sveistrup. Now those of us who have been boring everybody silly about how great The Killing is will have to go cold turkey, while the rest of you really ought to catch up with it on DVD. Never, quite possibly, have so many Britons gathered on a Saturday night to watch a subtitled TV drama – or timeshifted it to an otherwise boring Wednesday night. And, most unexpectedly, The Killing's British faithful became engaged by Danish municipal politics, following idealistic mayoral candidate Troels Hartmann as the murder case threatens to derail his campaign and love life, and to bring down seemingly everyone in the town hall. We were blind-sided by the shattering grief of Nanna's parents Pernille and Theis (I've never seen a TV drama that has dealt so unsparingly with family bereavement since the first episode of Twin Peaks, when Laura Palmer's body was found bagged and blue by the lake, and even that now seems stylised by comparison). We couldn't tear ourselves away from Sarah Lund, the appealingly dysfunctional detective who in episode one is preparing to move to Sweden with her boyfriend. Mostly, viewers were captivated by the compelling characters. Of course, these aren't the main reasons the show attracted such a hard-core cult following on BBC4. And spoken Danish sounds sometimes like a Scouse-Glaswegian mashup. This Copenhagen looks like Birmingham, Manchester or Newcastle at their bleakest.
Maybe that's one reason The Killing has been a sensation in Britain – we feel at home in its rain-soaked north European heart. The directors ignored its royal palaces, lovely parks and elegant 17th-century terraces, instead favouring damp motorways glistening under street lights, a 21st-century cityscape brooding beneath leaden skies. Copenhagen's wonderfulness has been airbrushed from Forbrydelsen (The Killing's Danish title).
One minor thing that the hit thriller does is to shatter any twee notions of the Danish capital. Welcome to wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. Her tortured, sexually abused body is later found in the boot of a car pulled from a canal. Bloody and terrified, teenage student Nanna Birk Larsen running from her attacker as night-lights from howling incoming planes strafe the birch trees.
Admittedly, it was the most hackneyed scene in the whole 20-hour series, but let's not spoil the story. Looking down, I realise that's where the opening of The Killing was filmed. J ust before our plane lands at Copenhagen airport, we fly over a wood.
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