She's said she didn’t watch Forbrydelsen. As Richmond, Campbell delivers some terrifically clunky lines: “I was taking a much-needed break” he intones in episode two.Įnos will draw most scrutiny. Lars Mikkelsen’s Troels Hartmann was more tortured, more vulpine than his glossier, emotion-driven American counterpart as played by Billy Campbell (pictured right). Holder and Meyer are equally fond of junk food. Stephen Holder, Linden’s detective partner (played by Joel Kinnaman), looks a wee bit like Forbrydelsen’s Jan Meyer and carries a fair amount of the original’s chippiness. Stanley Larsen is a ringer for Bjarne Henriksen’s Theis Birk Larsen. Some portrayals are very similar to the Danish originals. Pernille Birk Larsen, her mother, is now Mitch Larsen. Theis Birk Larsen, the father of murdered schoolgirl Nanna Birk Larsen (now Rosie Larsen), is Stanley Larsen. Local politician Troels Hartmann is now Darren Richmond. Abridged and remixed might be a better description.ĭetective Sarah Lund, played in Denmark by Sofie Grabøl, has become Sarah Linden (played by Mireille Enos). Could AMC have matched the challenge of the sinuous narrative and gone for somewhere unpredictable? A Toledo, Ohio? Or a Sioux Falls, South Dakota? As for that “based on”. Yet Copenhagen is now Seattle, a fashionably edgy and oft-seen city. The credits for The Killing say it is “based on” Forbrydelsen. Thankfully, it’s not a travesty like AMC’s recent and pointless version of The Prisoner. The Killing has to, somehow, be a lesser thing than Forbrydelsen. The continual punctuation brought by the need for ad breaks in the AMC rendition breaks the flow.

Denmark and BBC Four got just under 55 minutes. Channel 4 and the American audience get around 43 minutes per episode.

The US Killing has obvious differences from Forbrydelsen. More than the elephant in the room, Forbrydelsen (called that here to distinguish between the two) is the room – the room in which The Killing has to find its own place. Channel 4’s screening of the US remake of The Killing will attract more viewers than BBC Four ever could, but it’s impossible to watch the Seattle-set makeover without thinking back to the original

The killing danish original