The Killing: Twin Peaks + The Wire?
MARCH 30, 2011 TAGS:
Scrawled in red on a close up portrait of a young brunette with soft, kind eyes is the question, “Who Killed Rosie Larson?” This is an ad for the new AMC series The Killing, which premieres this Sunday. The series follows a Seattle detective investigating the death of a pretty, popular high school girl.
Sound familiar? “Trees… Good girl with no secrets… The Pacific Northwest?” asks Welcome to Twin Peaks, a web site for fans of the David Lynch series that heated up water cooler talk in the early 1990s.
Yes, this show sounds exactly like Twin Peaks, which in the decades since its airing has become something of a cult phenomenon, as much for its stylized quirks and oddball metaphysics (“the owls are not what they seem”) as for the narrative action of the show.
The producers of The Killing have a more direct antecedent than Lynch’s Peaks. A Danish series called, Forbrydelsen (The Crime), ripped up airwaves in Scandinavia in 2007. It constitutes the direct basis for The Killing. AMC, which is having trouble re-signing its flagship drama Mad Men, hopes that the intertwined stories of a murder, a family and a city has equal pull with American audiences.
And the cable channel has good reason to believe it will. A murder proposes two stories, the action leading to the killing and the way those facts are figured out, dealt with and prosecuted.
The former is all lurid detail of the sex and drug lives of teenagers. The latter is procedural struggle, depicting adults trying to find agency in a world of closed doors and career do-nothings.
That second part sounds like the HBO masterpiece, The Wire. To be sure, the murder in the Killing occurs during a mayoral election and a young charismatic mayor has no choice but to get involved, much like the young charismatic mayor of the fictive Baltimore in third and fifth seasons of The Wire.
But a fundamental maxim lies at the heart of shows like The Killing: the end of a life is the beginning of another story. The kind of story that's hard to turn away from. That maxim also holds true in real life.
Over the past year, the popular parent blogger Katie Granju has been fighting with local police about the death of her 18 year-old son, who died of an overdose in 2010. Granju runs the blog, Mammapundit and is the author of the parenting book Attachment Parenting. She sercretly dealt with her son's addiction to drugs for years. When he died, she mourned publicly on her blog. And now, she is battling local police for their mishandling of the investigation into his death.
According to Granju, “Both Tennessee law and federal statute define death resulting from the distribution of illegal drugs as homicide.” She hopes that those who supplied her son Henry with drugs and were present during his overdose, face jail time.
Henry Granju was a slight, curly haired boy. As with his fictional counterparts, a glimpse of the tragedy of his death, and the pain of his parent can be caught from looking at his young face.
Sound familiar? “Trees… Good girl with no secrets… The Pacific Northwest?” asks Welcome to Twin Peaks, a web site for fans of the David Lynch series that heated up water cooler talk in the early 1990s.
Yes, this show sounds exactly like Twin Peaks, which in the decades since its airing has become something of a cult phenomenon, as much for its stylized quirks and oddball metaphysics (“the owls are not what they seem”) as for the narrative action of the show.
The producers of The Killing have a more direct antecedent than Lynch’s Peaks. A Danish series called, Forbrydelsen (The Crime), ripped up airwaves in Scandinavia in 2007. It constitutes the direct basis for The Killing. AMC, which is having trouble re-signing its flagship drama Mad Men, hopes that the intertwined stories of a murder, a family and a city has equal pull with American audiences.
And the cable channel has good reason to believe it will. A murder proposes two stories, the action leading to the killing and the way those facts are figured out, dealt with and prosecuted.
The former is all lurid detail of the sex and drug lives of teenagers. The latter is procedural struggle, depicting adults trying to find agency in a world of closed doors and career do-nothings.
That second part sounds like the HBO masterpiece, The Wire. To be sure, the murder in the Killing occurs during a mayoral election and a young charismatic mayor has no choice but to get involved, much like the young charismatic mayor of the fictive Baltimore in third and fifth seasons of The Wire.
But a fundamental maxim lies at the heart of shows like The Killing: the end of a life is the beginning of another story. The kind of story that's hard to turn away from. That maxim also holds true in real life.
Over the past year, the popular parent blogger Katie Granju has been fighting with local police about the death of her 18 year-old son, who died of an overdose in 2010. Granju runs the blog, Mammapundit and is the author of the parenting book Attachment Parenting. She sercretly dealt with her son's addiction to drugs for years. When he died, she mourned publicly on her blog. And now, she is battling local police for their mishandling of the investigation into his death.
According to Granju, “Both Tennessee law and federal statute define death resulting from the distribution of illegal drugs as homicide.” She hopes that those who supplied her son Henry with drugs and were present during his overdose, face jail time.
Henry Granju was a slight, curly haired boy. As with his fictional counterparts, a glimpse of the tragedy of his death, and the pain of his parent can be caught from looking at his young face.
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