Is The Killing the most hated show on television? It’s certainly among the most polarizing – and its insistence on red herrings and thin characters made its first season one of the most frustrating shows of 2011. Well, its back, and with a fresh sense of determination to throw inexplicable events and random plot twists at viewers. On some level, it feels like Veena Sud is throwing the middle finger at the audience, a not-so-subtle attempt to remind us that she’s in charge of this show and her way is the best way.

So why cover it? Well, even bad shows are worth covering for examinations of what works – and more importantly, what doesn’t work. In a case with a show like The Killing, there are a number of good performances to watch – although this season’s two hour premiere proved some of those performances may not be able to hold up over a second season of silly scripting. In any case, I stuck through the first terrible season of this show, and am going to see it through, no matter how much hair I rip out. So without further ado, the season premiere…

Sud wastes no time in the first hour pissing on every event of season one, and spending the second half deconstructing season 1’s reality, setting it up for what it’s going to be moving forward – which she throws a big neon sign at us from Linden’s mouth: “her death was part of something bigger.” If you’re looking for the first frustrating moment of the season, there it was (unless you count the constant presence of the nurse’s questions to Jamie to remind us how dire Richmond’s situations was).

It’s a fact the show refused to acknowledge in the first season, both in structure and execution:  an entire season was spent building a murder mystery, only to reveal in the 14th hour (nine months later) that the whole thing was a ruse (even the show’s title). This isn’t about a killing; it’s really a multi-season political conspiracy, and thus should be called The Conspiracy. There were a lot of hints in the first season – the entire political campaign storyline that felt shoehorned in being chief among them.

But the show’s focus on the more mundane activities of police procedurals and grief-filled dramas led viewers to believe this murder was somewhat of a contained story. With the introduction of other lieutenants, a whole shit ton of shady twists like the backpack switches and fake photos, The Killing is making one thing painfully clear: this shit is going to get a lot more confusing real fast.

But for a show that tells us in direct dialogue that “things are going to be different”, it felt all pretty much the same – but it didn’t rain, so maybe I’m totally wrong. Holder’s still trying to ride both sides of the rail, and it’s revealed that his agenda is to be a powerful cop so people might forget he was once a crank head. Richmond is pissed and paralyzed (gasp! the plot twists), and everyone else is swirling around with their own mysteries and emotions.

It still feels like a show that’s being vague for the sake of being vague, and in cases like Belko’s interrogation and subsequent suicide, extremely lazy. Did anyone feel like that was a wasted plot line? If the show wanted to really make itself different than most police shows, they would’ve kept him alive, at least for a couple episodes in the aftermath of a political assassination attempt, especially a misguided one. Instead, all we get is some wacko rocking in a chair and shots of his murdered mother (by the way – why the fuck would he knock off his mom? SO RANDOM). He then somehow he pulls someone’s gun, and they let him wave it around for thirty seconds before he blows his head off. But I guess we can’t have all these characters and their complicated emotions when there’s conspiracies afoot!

So season 2 is really just a new question: what is the conspiracy? To which, I answer with my own: why does the conspiracy have to be what’s important? We’ve moved past the point of Rosie Larsen’s murder being of paramount importance, which is disappointing. And in reality, my hope all along was for The Killing to be more about Holder and Linden than about what happened to Rosie – dreams crushed many a rainy first season episode ago. We’ve gone from this show being about two wounded groups of characters (police and grieving families) to being a writer’s chess game of American political conspiracy (what a NOVEL idea). And it’s a change that doesn’t even feel earned to the audience, because we still don’t know much more than we did after the series premiere a year ago.

At least the show’s music is still good, and the cinematography of Seattle handled wonderfully when under the helm of Agnieszka Holland, who directed “Reflections”, the first hour, and whose style really established the show’s cinematic style for others to follow with her work in the first season. There isn’t a whole lot to do with the show’s mundane and transparent dialogue, and its a big credit to the actors and directors who are trying to make something mature and layered out of the juvenile, defiantly misleading philosophy behind every word in the scripts.

Even the one promising thing about The Killing is frustrating: seeing a paralyzed, falsely framed politician is ripe material for grounded moments of drama. But we won’t get that: Richmond is now part of this conspiracy, although this major character change is initiated by a short-lived piece of plot that resolves itself all over the back of the police station office window before it even gets a chance to settle in. But this is how things have to be if you want to be the most frustrating, occasionally laughable ‘serious’ show on television.

Other thoughts/observations:

• No, I didn’t talk about Gwen and the short nerdy P.R. guy whose name I can’t remember (it’s Jamie, thanks IMDB). She cried a lot, he punched a black guy, and they had a whole lot of screen time to do a whole lot of nothing. (fart noise)
  
• Are we going to see Mitch anytime soon? We better, before Jamie Ann Allman morphs into Connie, her character on The Shield, gets all meth-heady and leg-spready on Stan.
  
• all those promotions and demotions and early retirements were poorly explained and didn’t really seem to do much except add another totally mind-blowing layer of mystery to the show. Oh ,wait, we don’t know the characters, so we don’t care.
  
• this show seriously is a cluster fuck of misleads, bad cop instincts, and inconsistencies. “IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!!!”  I feel your frustration, Stan. It wasn’t.
  
• the photographer at the end of the first hour? when will we hear more about this… fourth hour, fifth hour? What’s the line in Vegas?
  
• Pandora’s Box of Shit – has any show ever so eloquently defined itself in one phrase?
  
• vocab word of the week: obsequious. way to throw one in from the dictionary, guys!

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