The Killing (AMC) Discussion

[Temis the Vorta]

From what I understand, the murder was solved in the first season.

The same showrunner created both versions, right? So I wonder, why the change? Either its a procedural and you reveal who the killer is at the end of the story (season) or it's a character drama, and you make sure your characters can carry the show on its own, which judging from the comments in this thread, isn't exactly the case.

 

[bigdaddy]

To answer that question. ^

TVLINE | That was a very bold move not to solve the murder mystery in the season finale considering the show was only recently renewed for a second season. Why did you decide to deviate from the Danish version of the show in this regard?
The Danish series’ investigation was 20 episodes. So they had a big giant season with tons of really interesting twists and turns that, because we only had 13 episodes in our first season, we weren’t able to use. And I really wanted to be able to use some of that material.

Other interesting parts...

TVLINE | Fair enough. Can you say whether Rosie’s murder will be solved in Season 2?
We will solve the investigation of who murdered Rosie Larsen in season 2, and there will also be a second case that will emerge next season. But I can’t tell you when exactly either will happen.
TVLINE | Just to clarify, when you say the investigation will be solved — does that mean the real killer will be caught?
[Laughs] I’m sorry. Yes, the killer will be revealed. All will be revealed about who murdered Rosie Larsen. [Laughs] I wasn’t trying to parse words.
TVLINE | Any concern about it leaking? Will there be a penalty of death if someone gets drunk at a party and says something they shouldn’t?
[Laughs] There certainly is no penalty of death. The writers and myself are really proud of this mystery and we worked really hard to wrap it up in a way that is deeply satisfying so we want to protect it. We want to unleash it on the world when it’s time and not before that.

The whole thing....

http://www.tvline.com/2011/06/the-killing-season-finale-spoilers-recap/

 

[scnj]

The second case is of course focused on the Black Lodge.

 

[Witterquick]

*Aaah, I bet Tyrion could make mincemeat of any zombie horde.

Have you seen him in battle?

I love The Walking Dead but Game of Thrones is way way better. It has replaced Breaking Bad and Dexter as my favorite ongoing shows. Season two has a lot to live up to.

I haven't watched the last 2 eps of The Killing but I've always been slow to catch up on this show. It's really boring and too weepy for my taste. Plot-wise, it's nothing special. Just a run of the mill procedural story drawn out too long. I just don't see the point.

 

[Professor Zoom]

From what I understand, the murder was solved in the first season.

The same showrunner created both versions, right? So I wonder, why the change? Either its a procedural and you reveal who the killer is at the end of the story (season) or it's a character drama, and you make sure your characters can carry the show on its own, which judging from the comments in this thread, isn't exactly the case.

The same showrunner did not do both versions. Veena Sud developed the American version, basing it on the Danish one. Sud used to work on Cold Case.

 

[OsmiumJohnnycake]

I'm disappointed. Not angry but disappointed the case didn't wrap up. If the murder is solved early on in s2 and a new case starts, I guess I'm mostly irritated with how they broke things up. I was expecting/hoping this season would be pretty self-contained. I know some folks complained about the lack of closure on Rubicon (a fantastic show, I thought), and while it was open-ended in some ways, it was a lot more of an end than The Killing got. I'll tune in next season, but now I feel like I've been forced into it if I want to get any closure. I probably would have checked out next year anyway, but I wonder how many people AMC turned off with this technique.

The cliffhanger would have been a lot less annoying if I had found this season stellar but I mostly stuck in there for the resolution (although I did warm to a few of the characters).

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Sounds like the real problem is that they didn't show the whole story in one run, and they're splitting it with a YEAR in the middle - nice way to kill momentum!

That's about enough on a show I don't even watch and am not planning to start watching.

 

[IndyJones]

Alan Sepinwall hated the finale, but I think his best point is in how completely the show failed to deliver on it's original premise: To spend a full season on one case so we could delve really deeply into the case and the characters.

Link:

At this point, "The Killing" has virtually nothing else. It utterly failed to make Rosie herself matter. It failed at making Stan and Mitch into anything but monotonous engines of grief. It failed to make the political campaign the least bit interesting at any point. And while it briefly turned Linden and Holder into three-dimensional humans with the episode a few weeks ago that put the investigation on hold, a lot of that was undercut by the Holder reveal here at the end. Obviously, the stuff about his addiction, his sister and his nephew was true, but the building of the relationship and trust with Linden wasn't.

...

We were told that Sud and company would use the extended time to really get to know the characters in a way that a traditional police procedural can't. We haven't. Most of the characters have turned out to be ciphers (the Larsens), not who we were told they were (Holder) or both (Richmond).

 

[Roger Wilco]

No, it was a cliffhanger. Governor Walker's budget is a travesty. 16 hours later I'm home from work and I still can't fathom what the big deal is. So they went another direction.

So what?

What is the big freaking deal? I've had some problems with a few plot points, but the finale was absolutely not one of the problems. People are too excitable over a show they claim not to care about. I reiterate--they decided to go in another direction. So what?

I agree. I would have liked some resolution, but getting angry at the show for not giving an answer yet is just silly imo.

 

[the G-man]

No, it was a cliffhanger. Governor Walker's budget is a travesty. 16 hours later I'm home from work and I still can't fathom what the big deal is. So they went another direction.

So what?

What is the big freaking deal? I've had some problems with a few plot points, but the finale was absolutely not one of the problems. People are too excitable over a show they claim not to care about. I reiterate--they decided to go in another direction. So what?

I agree. I would have liked some resolution, but getting angry at the show for not giving an answer yet is just silly imo.

It sounds to me like the beef is that they allegedly promised one murder per season and then reneged in the last couple of minutes. I can see both sides of the argument but, if they did promise one case per season, not doing so now is a little like the producers of 24 suddenly deciding that Jack's day isn't over and running a cliffhanger at the end of a season.

 

[Roger Wilco]

I just find it funny that most of the complaint I've read go like "I didn't give a shit about the show anyway, no way in hell I was going to tune in to the second season, I just wanted to know who the murderer is, how dare they fool me like that"

I'll watch the second season too, despite its flaws, as long as they reveal who killed the girl before the show gets cancelled I'm ok with whatever the writers want to do with it.

 

[Agent Richard07]

I was only watching for two reasons... 1) I was interested in Ahmed's story and hoped to see everyone in his life chagrinned when they found out that he didn't do it. And 2) I wanted to see who the killer was. Otherwise, the show was pretty boring and hard to slog through. I was planning to drop the show after the recent finale, but after reading what was planned for season 2 above, I might jump back in.

Never knew that The Walking Dead wasn't considered a great show on the level of Mad Men or Breaking Bad, or that AMC would prefer to see it take a back seat to its more grounded dramas.

 

[Geck]

From what I've read in the last few days, they plan to wrap up Rosie Larsen at some unspecified point during season 2, and there'll also be a second case that will start up and run through the rest of the season, probably with some overlap between the two cases for a while.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I just find it funny that most of the complaint I've read go like "I didn't give a shit about the show anyway, no way in hell I was going to tune in to the second season, I just wanted to know who the murderer is, how dare they fool me like that"

People are passionate about their TV. Look at this place, it was a BBS built around STAR TREK.

People felt there was a promise made. That they were going to reveal the murderer. And the promise was broken. I get it.

 

[bigdaddy]

There should be one killing a season, or a group or something. If the show failed we would get no closure, plus with one case a year there are always time for new viewers to jump in.

No it's just a boring show with unlikable characters.

 

[Obiwanshinobi]

I just find it funny that most of the complaint I've read go like "I didn't give a shit about the show anyway, no way in hell I was going to tune in to the second season, I just wanted to know who the murderer is, how dare they fool me like that"

People are passionate about their TV. Look at this place, it was a BBS built around STAR TREK.

People felt there was a promise made. That they were going to reveal the murderer. And the promise was broken. I get it.

Actually if you listen to the Firewall and Iceberg podcast, they mention during early press junkets for the show that there were no actual promises of the murder being resolved in one season. Sure there were implications and a whole ad campaign about the murder being resolved, but still not promised to be concluded this season. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending the show because I, like most of you guys most likely won't return next season, but just thought I'd point it out.

Fast forward to the last hour of the episode:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.hitfix.com/podcasts/214/Firewall_Iceberg_Podcast79.mp3

Essentially it's them ripping the finale apart as one would suspect.

 

[Professor Zoom]

I just find it funny that most of the complaint I've read go like "I didn't give a shit about the show anyway, no way in hell I was going to tune in to the second season, I just wanted to know who the murderer is, how dare they fool me like that"

People are passionate about their TV. Look at this place, it was a BBS built around STAR TREK.

People felt there was a promise made. That they were going to reveal the murderer. And the promise was broken. I get it.

Actually if you listen to the Firewall and Iceberg podcast, they mention during early press junkets for the show that there were no actual promises of the murder being resolved in one season. Sure there were implications and a whole ad campaign about the murder being resolved, but still not promised to be concluded this season. Don't get me wrong, I am not defending the show because I, like most of you guys most likely won't return next season, but just thought I'd point it out.

Fast forward to the last hour of the episode:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/images.hitfix.com/podcasts/214/Firewall_Iceberg_Podcast79.mp3

Essentially it's them ripping the finale apart as one would suspect.

True. There was no explicit promise from the producer. But all the adverts focusing on Who Killed Rosie? The multi media stuff--who do YOU think go to the website and choose...

All of that focuses the audience on that specific question.

So, perhaps, it's not a failure on the part of the producers, but a failure on the PR people, who created certain expectations.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

It's a failure of scheduling. If they needed 20 episodes or whatever to tell the story and reveal the killer, then they should have scheduled a 20-episode season.

Does anyone read a murder mystery, get halfway through it, put it aside for a YEAR and then pick it back up? Of course not. That would be idiotic.

So why schedule a murder-mystery series that way? If the producers didn't predict this reaction, they're idiots.

 

[OsmiumJohnnycake]

Also the Danish series wrapped it up in one season, right?*

The other reason I expected it wrapped up is how the show ran. After a huge chunk was spent on what turned out to be the wrong suspect, it seemed they were finally going to get back on track and they had just enough episodes to do it. I don't think the "Who Killed Rosie?" story has more than an episode or two left in it unless they start throwing in a lot of absurd developments (which they might be looking to do based on the ending with Holder) or another long dead end like Ahmed.

Things that make me less-than-enthusiastic about the second season:

-Linden's coming back, she has to come back, with much of the first season spent having her come this close to leaving time after time, did we really need to have another "Linden is leaving even though that makes no sense because she's the main character on the show" moment punctuating the final episode?

- We might be stuck with a lot of other characters I was hoping to ditch with the resolution to Rosie's murder (the aunt has been confirmed as returning). I don't want to see a subplot about Stan's mob involvement. I was hoping for a fresh start with only Linden and Holder as holdovers.

- And speaking of the main characters, so far this show hasn't exhibited enough guts to have something major change like Holder turning out to be a bad guy, so I expect him to be revealed as working for the good guys with the fake photo after an episode or two of making it seem like he might be bad (something they already did in the first season).

Love the look and music and the acting is all good even when I don't like the characters, but I don't have a lot of faith in the show's overall direction and showrunners.

*Edited to add: I didn't see this.

1. The ending. This is what most of the outraged US fans might be most interested to learn. What is now known as Forbrydelsen season one, was originally going to be broadcast as two seasons. It began in January of 2007 in Denmark, and quickly became the most popular TV show on the air. It ran for ten weeks, then ended with an enormous game-changing cliff-hanger… and Danish fans were outraged that they’d have to wait ten months for the next season to solve this mystery. Apparently the network got so much angry email from viewers that they immediately went back into production, and launched what is now considered the “second half” of season one that September.

So… The Danish show got their fans just as angry with a cliffhanger ending instead of a solution.

 

[J.T.B.]

I guess the thing that bugged me about that final episode was the way the series led up to it. It was not only slow paced, but seemed to deliberately dispense important clues one episode at a time. Of course most of the clues were distractions, so the show started to seem like Blind Alley Weekly. If this had built up in a more suspense-filled way, like Twin Peaks did, so you were on the edge of your seat waiting for the next development, the pacing might have been OK. But the show just seemed to plod on through each dreary, dark and rain-drenched ep, with the characters moping along like nothing much was happening. Did the detectives feel an clock-ticking urgency to catch the killer before he killed again? They didn't act like it, they barely even mentioned it.

So with the show passing by pretty much level, I was expecting a sharp ramp up in action, suspense or something in the last few episodes, and it didn't happen. And not only did the resolution pretty much peter out, but Linden all of a sudden became stupid and confronted Richmond personally to yell at him. Coming from a character that had been so un-emotive previously, it didn't really come naturally, plus the fact that it was a dumb thing to do for her case. "Not sure I agree 100% with your police work there," as Marge Gunderson would say.

I also can't remember watching a series with so little a sense of humor. And I don't mean that a murder investigation should be filled with jokes, but a little would have helped me along the show's baseline downer trip.

So I'm considering whether I'll watch the next season, and I probably will, but it won't be one of those where I count the days to the new installment.

--Justin