The Killing Or How I Learned to Hate Netflix

Sarsgaard

Enos

Kinnamon

Let it be understood: "The Killing" is not "The Wire."
Both are bleak police procedurals,  but "The Killing" has none of insight into social and economic complexity of the "Wire." 
While both deal with dysfunctional institutions, the dysfunction of "The Killing" derives simply from the dysfunction of wounded, twisted, inadequate individuals, not from a more complex miasma of disintegrating,  structurally flawed cauldrons of destroyed families, desperate economic conditions, foul political structures and inadequate educational and journalistic institutions. 

In "The Killing" it's personal angst and anomie turning its hollowed out face to the gray green rain of Seattle, where people crawl out of their holes to slink through another day of existential dread, and where life is, to paraphrase Hume, squalid, brutal, ruthless and short. It's that Munch painting, "The Scream," but with a different palate: grays, blacks, muted greens.
 And yet...there are unforgettable characters, namely Holder (Joel Kinnaman) Linden (Mireille Enos) and a condemned death row inmate (Peter Sarsgaard.)

If an actor has ever given a more powerful sustained performance than Sargaard's, if an actor has ever created a more complex, enthralling character who is by turns repellent, sympathetic, hardened, vulnerable, real, The Phantom has not yet run across that.

The best argument against the death penalty is simply that human beings are too pathetically inept to get the verdict right often enough to justify the death penalty. That elaborate charade of pseudo truth seeking, which has a much chance of actually rigorously examining facts and arriving at the correct conclusion as a monkey has of writing Hamlet on his first try at a keyboard, which we call a "trial" is simply inadequate to the task. 

So we put innocent people to death with regularity. Only DNA science has been powerful enough to expose the thoroughgoing ineptitude of juries, the venality of prosecutors the stupidity of police and the phoniness of the whole system.

When you watch the state executing its somber, sanctimonious will in the form of legal execution, you learn more about America than you care to.

It is a bleak, Scandinavian view of  America the beautiful, and of life,  and you finish watching an episode and turn on the lights, in a cold sweat, relieved it was only a bad dream.

Of course, if you watch it on Netflix, which streams the drama interrupted every 30 seconds by ads for the same zombie programs, you had better have your thumb on the fast forward.  The third season is only available in the zombie riven form.

But if you can wend your way past Netflix defiling the art, and if you can accept the occasional implausible explanation and connection, the reward for working your way through "The Killing" is the closest thing you are likely to find since "The Wire."

It's bleak, in a good way. 

Worlds better than Breaking Bad, which is more to the American taste, with explosions and lots of cartoon characters, "The Killing" is worth it because you can see astonishing actors in memorable roles. If you read The Stranger in college and could never quite forget it, you really ought to watch, "The Killing."