What Does The Killing Remind Me Of?

I stayed up late Sunday night to catch the replay of AMC's much-anticipated new series The Killing, and it did not disappoint. When it comes to television, American fans of crime fiction don't have all that much to be proud of. We put out a lot of quantity, but not a lot of quality. You can only point to The Wire so many times without coming off as a one-note. So despite its foreign pedigree, I'm hoping The Killing will stick around, and will inspire more of the same. 

Above: Cops in search of a crime.

The reason so many people are comparing The Killing to The Wire is that it employs the same series-arc approach. Most crime shows have an episodic structure; each week there's a new murder to solve. The Pacific northwest setting has led to some Twin Peaks references, too, but The Killing is serious in tone rather than quirky. It's moody and atmospheric, though (unlike The Wire, which favored a certain blunt realism). 

Having a whole season to unpack the story gives The Killing a more novelistic feel. Instead of shoehorning the whole process into forty-five minutes worth of rushed sound bites in the manner of Law & Order, the show can have more weight, more "duration." AMC's promotional effort seems to understand that, for an American audience, this can be a turn-off. They're trying extra-hard to keep us hooked.

For all the comparisons, there is one match noticeably absent. The show I kept thinking of while watching the first two episodes of The Killing was not The Wire, it was Five Days, the BBC series that follows "five non-consecutive days (days 1, 3, 28, 33 and 79) of a police investigation into the disappearance of a young mother and her two children." I'm a sucker for the whole 'story of the investigation' approach, in contrast to the whodunnit, and if The Killing turns out to be anywhere near as good as Five Days was, I will be most pleased.