TV Review: The Killing (Season 1)

The promotional ads for AMC’s The Killing posed the question “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?”. Relevant question, but the real inquiry  was “Will you trust us for 13 hours of television?” Knowing showrunner Veena Sud’s history on Cold Case (translation: Zzzzzzzzzz…), I entered the premiere warily, perhaps with a slight prejudice against those involved with network crime procedurals (yes, I am one of those The Wire pricks).

The pilot – shot beautifully in part one by Patty Jenkins (Monster), and part two by the phenomenal Ed Bianchi (of The Wire fame, among others), was intriguing. Using Seattle as a backdrop for a story of grief and loss reverberating through a community fit snugly. The protagonist, homicide detective Sarah Lyndon, was portrayed by Mireille Enos with a subtlety I enjoyed. The characters surrounding her weren’t as fleshed out as the length of a two-hour pilot allows, but I chalked it up to story introduction, and dramatic saturation for initial ratings. After all, Sud said she wanted to make something different and unformulated (although the pilot reeked of political corruption, a staple in modern mysteries).

As the show moved through it’s initial hours, it became clear The Killing had some ambitions to be different. The depictions of grief within Rosie’s immediate family was particularly engrossing, with her parents Stan and Rosie (Brent Sexton and Michelle Forbes, respectively) going through the many stages of shock and grief in a poignant manner. Their other two children (both boys) displayed honest emotions without fanfare, helping further the emotional depth the show was attempting to achieve.

Still, small cracks were emerging in the show’s promise of ingenuity. Every reveal featured a long, dark corridor to be walked, and it was clear the writers were walking their own dark corridor, leaving every character on the table to be guilty as they felt out the audience’s emotions. It was a bold move, but played out awkwardly as the first couple suspects were ruled out. It almost seemed the show’s writers weren’t confident the audience would stay interested during the ‘slow burn’ of the murder investigation. Almost all dramatic shows suffer from this idea each and every episode (be it 13 or 23 episode seasons) should have a super-dramatic twist at the end, 95% of which are dumped once the next episode begins (the buzzword on the internet with critics is ‘red herring’, which I think is a shit phrase. We’ll just call it ‘lazy writing’ from here on out.)

Then, somewhere between the 7^th and 9^th episodes, the worst possible thing occurred: I began to hate Sarah Lyndon. She was at a point of crisis in her life when we met her in the pilot, and instead of going away from the female TV stereotypes, the writers decided to turn them up full notch. She was an awful mother (a truth only compounded further as the season progressed), and a terrible girlfriend. Worst of all, she was a strikingly bad cop. She continuously made irrational and emotional decisions, and like most women portrayed on television, just didn’t think shit through. I will say, the writers didn’t help themselves anyway by each episode ending with Lyndon figuring something out, and the next episode beginning with her being proved wrong. It only made us distrust her intuition, never a good thing for your supposedly smart main character.

The best character on the show was clearly her partner Stephen Holder, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Joel Kinnaman isn’t winning an Emmy for his portrayal. He’s complex, and his character thrives in the rain (IT’S ALWAYS RAINING), exposing himself in certain moments, though leaving his character shrouding in mystery. Kinnaman does his best with the cloudy writing, and although his story arc sucks, he commands attention when on-screen. (Note: the fact Lyndon is a raging bitch to him for no reason all season only makes her character worse.)

So, at this point, we’re 10 episodes in. Suspects are being ruled out, vague clues are being unraveled at a distractingly slow pace, and it hit me: this show sucks. First of all, if the show wants to say “Fuck formula”, why have every episode be one day? It sounds great on paper, but it’s a lame gimmick which slows the ‘burn’ to a complete stop (or maybe the CONSTANT RAIN put it out). Rosie’s parents are left in a constant cycle of grief and failure, narrowing the scope of their characters and ultimately, making us feel bitter towards the mother (again with the woman-hating…. wonder why it’s on the same channel as Mad Men?)

And in the 11^th episode, 2 hours from the finale, the show killed itself with a 45-minute episode trying to stuff in all this character expository and relationship development between Lyndon and Holder that had been missing all season. But by that point, I just wanted to know what the hell happened to Rosie already, and I went 40 minutes without hearing the mention of her name and/or case. To say I was furious was an understatement. It was a culmination of frustrations, from the half dozen characters that disappeared from the plot after 4 hours, to the wasted secondary characters in the political story obviously tied to the center of the mystery.

The last two episodes were terrible, which was to be expected. SPOILER: the murder doesn’t get solved, and they probably arrested the wrong person, along with a number of other conventional and unrealistic season finale plot twists (Mitch leaves her husband and two boys, AND you don’t tell us where… c’monnnnn). It was clear again the writers were desperate for something which would guarantee them a second season, clearly not having the confidence to wrap up this case tidily in the last two hours and introducing something new.

At the credits rolled on the season finale, I was severely disappointed. A show which lauded it’s status of being different, really wasn’t different at all. Badly paced and blatantly confusing because it had no point, episodes 2-12 really only existed to manipulate us away from our initial instincts. Honestly, you could watch the pilot and the finale and not really miss much, save for some REALLY boring, random, and severely underdeveloped back stories (and some great scenery work by Wire alum Agneiszka Holland in the episodes she directed).

But the awful portrayal of women, both those in Rosie’s family, in the legal and political worlds, and especially with the few teenage girls portrayed, including Rosie, was so deplorable, it overshadowed the awful plot and cardboard characters. If you really wanted to be different, why have the same crime 90% of ALL crime shows have- I’m talking about violence against women. Why couldn’t we have a boy killed for once?

People will watch The Killing next season, but the writers made a major mistake putting all their eggs in that basket for the beginning of next season. Once we know who killed Rosie Larson, we’ll be left with the same shitty characters in the same rain (somehow smoking cigarettes in the horrendous downpour), trying to figure out some new shitty politically-charged investigation. And people will stop watching then, because there isn’t much original to The Killing at all.

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