The Bridge Returns To BBC Four This Saturday

This is Saga from the Bridge, the Swedish lady detective.

Why should you care?

It’s bloody brilliant, that’s why.

A fellow co-author of this website, Alice Rose, used to watch these live at the same time I was, we would feverishly text at the moments between one episode and the next. Being a public programme broadcast in Sweden and Denmark, the BBC has rights to it, there are no ad breaks, and you have to pay attention to the screen for the subtitles all the way through. This means opportunities to text or tweet about the show are few and far between.

Many people are thrown off the thought of watching a show if it involves subtitles (lazy), but I assure you the quality of the script and listening to the lovely Nordic languages more than makes up for it.

Last time around, the programme followed a “truth terrorist”, who was basically a mass murderer who was killing people to make a point about each of his victims (he poisoned a nursing home to point out how little we care about old people, for instance). It’s dark, twisted, and I cannot wait.

The two detectives on the case are a man from Denmark and a woman from Sweden. He spends his life trying to explain to her social etiquette, she’s hired as she’s brilliant, but mildly autistic, meaning she will come out with things like “we probably won’t find your son, by the way”, this sounds very dark, but this kind of humour in an otherwise murky series is often needed.

If you didn’t see Season 1, they’re all available on iPlayer for another week, and I’d strongly advise you watch this excellent series before everything restarts after Christmas. Set up iPlayer downloads on your computer every week, and enjoy. It is simply fantastic.

Here’s a trailer.