Unless I forgot something badly (and in this case it was probably not something good enough to remember) this may be my first TV series from Denmark that I see in the last 20 years or so, and the second after Lars von Trier‘s The Kingdom which amazed me in the mid 1990s. It certainly is not a masterpiece as I consider to be von Trier’s series (and most of his movies) but a very decent detective story and good entertainment.
source http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2025899/
Aarhus is a place whose name I know about since I was a kind, and so does any kid or former kid who was a passionate of geographical atlases and was looking in the index and dreaming to travel to all those places. It was the first or one of the first in any index, a city too small to ignore on the map of a country it took me about 40 years to get to for the first time. Aarhus is also the place where the first season of Dicte – Crime Reporter happens, with the Big City (Copenhagen) reporter Dicte Svendsen (Iben Hjejle) moving to the local edition of a newspaper together with her teenage daughter, running a failed marriage. Actually almost everybody in this film runs away bad marriages, with the exception of the ones who are single (that includes also the very young ones) – I am wondering if anybody is happily married in Denmark. Dicte is joined by her two good friends who have each her own marital or relationship problems, but the skeleton in her closet (very soon taken out) is much darker, as her past includes a teenage pregnancy and having lost her child sent to adoption. All murder cases that start to appear (it is a detective series, after all, and a good one) are also to some extent related to kids, adoptions, and her own past. Of course, detective Wagner (Lars Brygmann) who is her police counterpart is … divorced.
(video source TV2Danmark)
There is a lot of fuzz about Scandinavian crime novels, films and TV series, about the foggy or snowy landscape. Dicte – Crime Reporter is a little different, maybe it’s the fact that Denmark is at the Southern extremity of Scandinavia that makes this film look a little more sunny and better lit than other Scandinavian series. However, what is missing in landscape is better articulated in the characters. Good acting helps, with Iben Hjejle, Lars Brygmann, Lærke Winther Andersen, Lene Maria Christensen – all giving good performances and the unknown faces (at least for viewers not familiar with Danish TV and cinema) helps making the characters more credible. The important thing I believe is that eventually we get to know them and care about them – this makes for the good quality of this refreshing crime series. I am looking forward for the next two seasons, and I hope that the Israeli cable channel acquired them as well.