The seasons change, and with it our TV appetites. Summer is for scorched blue-sky reality shows and sweaty repeats of Celebrity Juice. Winter is for cosy family-friendly films and festive specials where the lead character finally falls in love. In spring we crave home renovation and social experiments where a historian lives like the Tudors for a month. And then autumn, dreary autumn, trudging in its wet boots ever closer, sees the onset of Scandinavian crime dramas where the detective drives four hours out of town in a Volvo to interrogate someone’s dad.
To Young Wallander (Netflix, from Thursday), then. Kurt Wallander is one of those characters who keeps getting rebooted like Spider-Man – first he was books, then he was a series of Swedish TV films, then he was Kenneth Branagh, now he’s young. Wallander here is a green-but-well-meaning street cop who lives on a troubled estate in the town of Ystad and witnesses a hate crime right on his doorstep, thus setting in motion the events that lead to him, one day, being Kenneth Branagh, eating pizza, and having a complicated relationship with his daughter.
Young Wallander is played by Swedish stage actor Adam Pålsson, and is incredibly good-looking as a result, but the rest is beat-for-beat Scandi-crime: a grizzled old salt (Richard Dillane) bends the rules without breaking them; there’s a chase through a tunnel and a poignant shot of some mist. Wallander sits in his dreary apartment, pouring himself one stiff drink after another.
This is all fine, normally, but I would question the timing of a TV show where the central hero is “police officer internally conflicted about being a cop, who still absolutely batters protestors with a baton while he’s mulling that one over”. The opening sequence sees Wallander and his buddy Reza (Yasen Atour) trump up some drug charges against a topless party host they deem to be too arrogant. Early on he meets his future wife when she heckles him at a street march. The entire estate turns on him when they learn he’s been living among them in secret as a cop. He is, in short, quite hard to like, and not in that hoary old way Branagh managed it – he’s hard to like as a concept. Defund Wallander! Abolish Wallander! Replace Wallander with a series of Wallander-shaped social services that better serve the community!
In 2020, there’s a lot of complicated discourse about whether it’s even possible to watch police dramas that posit police as the clean-cut forever-heroes without interrogating that notion a little. Young Wallander does not help with that. When the hate crime Wallander witnesses unfurls into a wider social commentary about the tinderbox immigration situation in Sweden – handled with that classic Netflix clang-you-over-the-head-with-a-frying-pan anti-tact – it gets harder and harder to just enjoy the show as a minimalist Scandi aesthetic wrapped around a grisly crime scene.
You want to snuggle up in Young Wallander like a warm bath after a bracing September afternoon walk. Instead you end up watching and going, “Ah yes, real life. I remember that”. You’re wearing the jumper but the cosiness just isn’t hitting. Autumn, like the summer that came before it, is cancelled this year.
