A young girl is murdered, sending shockwaves through her grieving family, the Seattle cops investigating the crime, and a mayoral campaign connected to the case. The trio of plot strands is the setup for The Killing, AMC's quietly unnerving drama, premiering Sunday with a two-hour episode (9 ET/PT).
By Chris Large, AP
Murder most foul: Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman portray detectives investigating a teenage girl's murder in The Killing, premiering Sunday.
By Chris Large, AP
Murder most foul: Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman portray detectives investigating a teenage girl's murder in The Killing, premiering Sunday.
Based on the popular Danish series Forbrydelsen, the serialized drama tells these converging stories in a 13-episode season, with each episode approximating a day in the investigation of teenager Rosie Larsen's murder.
If the soggy setting and the drawn-out mystery harks back to the more explicitly weird Twin Peaks, executive producer Veena Sud draws another parallel: "It's like Traffic," she says of the source material. "One murder, three stories, six degrees of separation, and all these worlds colliding. There are wonderful, addictive, compelling elements of the original, worlds I wanted to explore here and Americanize."
As a longtime writer and producer on CBS' Cold Case, Sud ? who says she hung out with the Cincinnati vice squad for kicks as a teen ? knows the crime-drama drill. "Procedurals appeal to the left brain and people who love puzzles, with the need for logic and to solve things. This show does that, but also shows what the real price of murder is."
The new version is more deeply focused on its characters: the effect of Rosie's death on her parents (Michelle Forbes and Brent Sexton) and her young brothers; Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell), a city councilman running for mayor who becomes enmeshed in the case; and taciturn detective Sarah Lund (Mireille Enos), a slight, pale, intense and unlikely hero.
"She's a human pit bull with as many compulsions, passions and obsessions as the greatest male detectives around her," Sud says. And "every cop I've ever met (has) one case that is their mission, and usually it's a kid's death."
Enos describes Sarah as "a wildly private person" who represses her own feelings and "turned herself into an observer of human nature with this empathic quality she can call on that gives her insight into victims' minds." But her obligation to victims comes at the cost of "loved ones who are alive and need her, and it's something she's going to struggle with."
In the pilot episode, she's about to quit her job and move to California with her son and fianc�, but the Larsen case keeps her in rainy Seattle, where she's paired with her quirky replacement-to-be, Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman).
"There's no filter between what's in his mind and what comes out of his mouth, and that's really annoying to Sarah," Enos says.
Campbell says Richmond is an idealist who's being "schooled in how to be a politician" by those surrounding him, and likens the role to the billionaire he played in USA's The 4400, where "they never told me whether I was a good guy or a bad guy, so I had to play it right down the middle. It's a really interesting exercise."
Even now, as the cast is shooting the penultimate episode in Vancouver this week, Campbell says the outcome remains "all up in the air."
Sud is cagey about whether the first season reveals the murderer, or what (and who) might populate a second season. "We're so used to formula in cop shows," she says, that the flexibility of The Killing's three-story format appealed to her as a way to fashion a long-term series.
"But there will be answers," she promises, "and a real conclusion by the end of Season 1."
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