October 3, 2010
IT'S INTERESTING FOR THE BUFF...:
Kenneth Branagh brings Swedish detective Kurt Wallander back to American TV (John Timpane, 10/03/10, Philadelphia Inquirer)
For the next three Sundays at 9 p.m., Masterpiece Mystery! will show "Wallander II," three new installments of the adventures of the rumpled, agonized police detective based in Ystad, Sweden. In the first, "Faceless Killers," Wallander faces greed, racism and revenge. For starters.Kenneth Branagh - who also is one of the executive producers - returns in his Emmy-nominated, British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award-winning role as Wallander, from the celebrated novels by Swedish master Henning Mankell. Branagh was stunning in the first three installments (which debuted on U.S. TV in 2009): paunchy, pale, unshaven, groping through psychological and moral obscurities to catch murderers and terrorists.
At an Aug. 4 gathering of TV critics, Branagh summed up the feel of the show: "There's something about coming from those northern lands, you know. It's a big country, small population, the seasons and the weather are extreme, and the possibility for looking inward into the interior life is great."
...because not only are the translations of the Wallander books into English recent enough that the reading of them has been fairly contemporaneous but the Brannagh adaptations are the third already, joining a Swedish tv movie series and Swedish theatrical version. The Swedish tv series is actually the best of the three, despite beginning with Wallander's annoying daughter joining the police force.
