When we first meet her she seems settled on a new life in Sweden. Lund goes through quite a journey in the course of the series. Sveistrup and Gråbøl worked together to create the character with the actress always lined up for the part. Although Lund wasn’t the most identifiable character, she was perhaps the show’s most interesting. It is not unfair to say that the show’s ace-in-the-hole character wise was Detective Inspector Sarah Lund, played by Sofie Gråbø l. Writer Søren Sveistrup not only crafted a well structured and complex story, but filled it with a cast of characters that over the course of twenty episodes allowed the audience a chance to deeply get to know them, and feel a connection with them. The compelling and surprising plot is only half of what lifted The Killing head and shoulders above its peers. The story dealt with their desperation for answers and an explanation to events, a closure that was once or twice dangled in their faces before being snatched away. The grief of Theis and Pernille Birk Larsen was laid bare as they tried to come to terms with their daughter’s death and keep things together for their young sons. A notable difference between The Killing and other police procedural dramas was that the show devoted a lot of time to detailing the repercussions of the murder upon the victim’s family. The most emotional story strand revolved around the Birk Larsen family themselves.
A plot then unfolds in which Hartmann’s political opponents endeavour to use this against him while his own parties decisions on what information to release to the police and the impact on the campaign that will have, formed many of the shows most revealing plot twists. The car in which Nanna Birk Larsen’s body is found belongs to Hartmann’s office. The first of these concerned Copenhagen mayoral candidate, Troels Hartmann. Running alongside this and intertwining on more than one occasion were two side plots.
The show’s primary storyline was that of the police investigation into the murder. The discovery of the girl’s body in a car at the end of episode one leads to Lund being drawn into an investigation that she finds impossible to leave behind the further it progresses. She accompanies her replacement, Jan Meyer, in an enquiry into the disappearance of a nineteen year old woman, Nanna Birk Larsen.
As the series opens, Lund is on the verge of leaving Copenhagen to join the Swedish police force and be with her fiancé and son. The main protagonist of the programme was Detective Inspector and knitwear aficionado, Sarah Lund. At twenty fifty-five minute episodes, the show didn’t bombard its audience at a relentless pace but took its time hooking them in and then turned the screw ever tighter. The Killing was shown in double bills over ten Saturday nights and gave viewers something that was rarely available on television. The impact of The Killing can perhaps be measured in that it is one of the few Scandinavian exports that has so far been picked up for its own US remake. Shown in its native Denmark in 2007, the show struck a huge chord with BBC4 viewers when it made its debut on the channel in the spring of 2011. If there was one show which stood at the pinnacle of this invasion then is was Forbrydelsen. Directly translated as “The Crime” but known to us in the UK as The Killing.